Downie discusses digital humanities research at CODH seminar in Japan

Stephen Downie
J. Stephen Downie, Professor, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center

J. Stephen Downie, professor and associate dean for research, participated in the Center for Open Data in the Humanities (CODH) seminar, "Big Data and Digital Humanities," on January 23 at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan.

Started in April 2016, the CODH will be formally established as a center in April 2017. It involves faculty from the National Institute of Informatics and The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, both in Japan, who collaborate with computer scientists and humanities scholars around the globe. CODH promotes research and development to improve access to humanities data, using the concept of open science along with the latest technology in informatics and statistics.

Downie gave the presentation, "Digital humanities using both closed and open data: Use cases from the HathiTrust Research Center":

The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) contains 14.7 million volumes (over 5 billion pages). Unfortunately, roughly 9 million HTDL volumes are under copyright restrictions and cannot be shared with users. To overcome this problem, the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is creating a set of "non-consumptive research" services to make these closed materials more open and thus useful to scholars. This talk introduces such non-consumptives services as "Data Capsules," "Extracted Features" and the "Bookworm + HathiTrust" tool. Each HTRC service is designed to open new points of access to otherwise closed data while still respecting all copyright limitations.

Downie is codirector of HTRC, a partnership between Indiana University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the HathiTrust. Established in 2011, HTRC develops cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge. 

"We are very excited about the official establishment of the Center for Open Data in the Humanities in Tokyo and the impact it will have on research in the digital humanities. I look forward to future collaborations between the CODH, HTRC, and the iSchool,” Downie said.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Knox appointed interim dean

Professor Emily Knox has been appointed to serve as interim dean of the School of Information Sciences, pending approval by the Board of Trustees. Until officially approved, her title will be interim dean designate. The appointment will begin April 1, 2025.

Emily Knox

iSchool instructors ranked as excellent

Fifty-six iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2024 and Winter 2024-2025. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the ratings from the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. 

iSchool Building

Ocepek and Sanfilippo co-edit book on misinformation

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons book

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."