What are You Going to Do with That Data? Humanities Scholars & Digital Collections

Presented at “Big Data & Uncertainty in the Humanities”, University of Kansas, September 22, 2012. Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities: http://idrh.ku.edu Harriett Green is an English and Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Illinois.Library collections are an important source of data for digital humanists: Libraries digitize, transcribe and mark up their repositories of texts, images, and manuscripts to produce digital collections of primary source materials for humanities scholars to use in textual analysis, data mining, visualizations, and many other types of research methodologies. But are libraries producing digital materials that are optimized for digital humanities research? And are humanists getting all of the types of data that they need for their research to reach its fullest potential? This paper will present the results of a recent need assessment study of humanities scholars on the incorporation of digital materials into their research and future needs when using digital collections. From October 2011 through May 2012, the author conducted a mass survey of English and History faculty and series of interviews with faculty from art, design, and theater departments from twelve U.S. research institutions (primarily from the Committee of Institutional Cooperation consortium). The author will analyze the data drawn from the survey and interviews to explore three facets of humanities scholars’ use of digital collections as research data: access to the data in the collections, the types of digital content, and the structure of the data