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For readers today, there is a wealth of information available about any given work they read, from its date of publication, its author’s biographical information, its genre, details about any previous editions or formats, and the like. On top of that, it seems as though nearly any book is available through online retailers like Amazon, public or university libraries, or as an e-book. With all this information about recent works at our fingertips, it was surprising to learn how much there still is to know about collections of written works that span only the past few centuries. On Friday, September 20, Ted Underwood, professor of English Literature and Information Science at the University of Illinois, addressed the participants of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, answering questions about how data and the absence of data relate to his work. Underwood’s area of expertise is distant reading — drawing conclusions about large collections of written work through an analysis of metadata and other less-subjective characteristics. As Underwood described in Digital Humanities Quarterly, distant reading was a technique in literature long before computers became equipped to help with it. When researchers first had access to computational methods like optical character recognition, which make the full text of a piece searchable, they applied them to a variety of problems, soon realizing what kinds of questions computers are suited to answer. People, rather than computers, are much better at closely reading a single text or the works of one author to characterize them, as well as answering “why” questions, such as “why did Read More

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Ted Underwood has been poking around in the massive HathiTrust database for a few years now, and it’s taught him that libraries are anything but uniform. During his talk with the Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Sept. 20, at the University of Pittsburgh, Underwood, a professor of English and information science at the University of Illinois, pictured his child-self walking through physical libraries, looking for books. He never guessed that every other library in existence didn’t catalogue their books in exactly the same way. But, as he now works with the metadata associated with digitized books in the HathiTrust database, he’s realized the human side of library science a bit more. He’s learned quite a bit about how physical libraries operate, he admitted. While there is national coordination with Library of Congress cataloguing standards, many of the decisions are up to individual librarians, he said. Underwood was the second speaker in the Sawyer Seminar yearlong series entitled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age.” He first spoke at a public lecture on Thursday, Sept. 19, and then for Sawyer Seminar participants on Friday. Many of Underwood’s projects deal with large collections of data, including the HathiTrust database, which stores the digitized collections of several universities totaling over 17 million volumes. In the past, he and his collaborators have leveraged that data to find that the number of women writers of fiction declined from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He and his team at Illinois are mining HathiTrust for their latest Read More