Enabling complex analysis of large-scale digital collections: humanities research, high-performance computing, and transforming access to British Library digital collections.
Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to provide largescale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these data sets for their own research purposes. This article reports on a pilot proje...
| Published in: | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 456 - 467 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , |
| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press / USA
Jun2018
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=129666132&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 129666132 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 2055768X JEO9 jtl: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities issn: 2055768X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2018 vid: 33 iid: 2 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 129666132 10.1093/llc/fqx020 ppf: 456 ppct: 11 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 602KB tig: atl: Enabling complex analysis of large-scale digital collections: humanities research, high-performance computing, and transforming access to British Library digital collections. aug: au: Terras, Melissa Baker, James Hetherington, James Beavan, David Austwick, Martin Zaltz Welsh, Anne O'Neill, Helen Finley, Will Duke-Williams, Oliver Farquhar, Adam affil: Department of Information Studies, University College London, UK and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London, UK School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex, UK Research Software Development Group, Research IT Services, University College London, UK UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London, UK Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, UK Department of Information Studies, University College London, UK Department of Information Studies, University College London, UK, The London Library, UK Department of History, University of Sheffield, UK Digital Scholarship, British Library, UK su: Cultural property Humanities University College, London British Library Academic-industrial collaboration sug: subj: Cultural property Humanities University College, London British Library Academic-industrial collaboration ab: Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to provide largescale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these data sets for their own research purposes. This article reports on a pilot project at University College London, working in collaboration with the British Library, to scope out how best high-performance computing facilities can be used to facilitate the needs of researchers in the humanities. Using institutional data-processing frameworks routinely used to support scientific research, we assisted four humanities researchers in analysing 60,000 digitized books, and we present two resulting case studies here. This research allowed us to identify infrastructural and procedural barriers and make recommendations on resource allocation to best support non-computational researchers in undertaking 'big data' research. We recommend that research software engineer capacity can be most efficiently deployed in maintaining and supporting data sets, while librarians can provide an essential service in running initial, routine queries for humanities scholars. At present there are too many technical hurdles for most individuals in the humanities to consider analysing at scale these increasingly available open data sets, and by building on existing frameworks of support from research computing and library services, we can best support humanities scholars in developing methods and approaches to take advantage of these research opportunities. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: © 2019 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities. item: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities holder: Oxford University Press / USA dt: @attributes: year: 2018 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|