The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is currently hosting its second annual UnCamp at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The 1.5-day event began yesterday afternoon and will conclude this evening with a closing keynote from Christopher Warren (Carnegie Mellon University).
The HTRC is a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust, who work to offer its users access to published public domain works, as well as future limited access to in-copyright works. By developing state-of-the-art tools and cyberinfrastructure, the HTRC hopes to resolve the technical challenges that occur within massive amounts of digital text, enabling access to the digital growing record of human knowledge.
In further approaching and talking about these technical challenges, the HTRC UnCamp brings together digital humanities tool developers, researchers and librarians, and graduate students. Its dynamic "un-conference" setting allows for casual discussions and hands-on interaction with HTRC tools and data.
This year, 128 participants have the opportunity to use the HTRC Data API to browse and run applications against 3.2 million volumes in HTRC Production, including the quarter million volumes of the HathiTrust public domain corpus. Other scheduled sessions include instructional and collaborative events like hands-on coding and demonstrations, inspirational use-cases, community building exercises, informational sessions, and HTRC focus groups led by University of Illinois researchers.
Matthew Wilkens (University of Notre Dame), presented the UnCamp's opening keynote this morning. John Wilkin, formerly the Executive Director of the HathiTrust and now the Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois, moderated a panel on the ongoing collaborative relationship between the HathiTrust and its research center in which Jeremy York spoke on behalf of the HathiTrust. Other session leaders include members of the HTRC executive committee Beth Plale (Indiana University), J. Stephen Downie (University of Illinois), Robert McDonald (Indiana University), and John Unsworth (Brandeis University); researchers affiliated with the HTRC: Zong Peng (Indiana University), Jiaan Zeng (Indiana University), Kirk Hess (University of Illinois), Loretta Auvil (University of Illinois), Ted Underwood (University of Illinois), Stacy Kowalczyk (Dominican University), Jaimie Murdock (Indiana University), Katrina Fenlon (University of Illinois), and Harriett Green (University of Illinois); scholars from the broader research community: Kathryn Stine (California Digital Library), Mitsunori Ogihara (University of Miami), Natalie M. Houston (University of Houston), and Jeremy Throne(University of California, Santa Cruz).
Photos of the event, presentation slides, and an archive of the #htrc13 Twitter feed will be made publicly available through http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_uncamp2013.