This project aims to develop infrastructure that transforms the process of discovery through semantically-aware analysis and visualization of data from the physical sciences, in the hopes of demonstrating the high impact that interdisciplinary data-driven research can have on scientific research as a whole.

COMBINI (connecting Complementary Medicine and Biological kNowledge to support Integrative Health) is a collaboration between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Mayo Clinic in Florida. Illinois serves as the primary site.

The goal of the project is to develop informatics resources and scientific…

Indiana University, in partnership with eight other academic libraries, will enable new kinds of computational research while ensuring librarians remain expert stewards of information collections. In the last decade, there has been a nearly exponential increase in the volume of digital content, much of which could be valuable for computational research. However, not all datasets can be made…

Librarians and digital humanities scholars from the University of Illinois in partnership with colleagues at Indiana University, Northwestern University, Lafayette College, the University of North Carolina, and the HathiTrust Research Center will develop a shared curriculum for use in academic libraries and a train the trainer series designed to assist librarians in getting started with the…

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is partnering with the Cultural Observatory team that developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer together with Google. The goal of this collaboration is to implement a greatly enhanced open-source version of the Cultural Observatory’s open-source “Bookworm” text analysis and visualization tool designed to assist scholars to meet the challenges posed by the…

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

This project is a collaboration with University of North Carolina (main site) and University of Colorado. Halil Kilicoglu serves as a co-PI and the lead at the University of Illinois. 

Systematic reviews are used to develop clinical guidelines, to set research priorities, and to help patients and clinicians make healthcare decisions. Systematic reviews of drugs should identify harms…

In order for older texts to be searchable, contemporary English needs to be translated into language from various historical timeframes. The project will develop software that will let people enter a query in contemporary English, and search over English texts throughout history—from Medieval times to the present day. The project will mostly involve training statistical models that assign…

This project aims to improve search engine effectiveness by using knowledge base (KB) entries to inform query expansion. While the intersection of KBs and information retrieval (IR) is a growing research area, this project proposes a novel approach to KB-based query modeling. In particular, this project proposes to let the structure that KB authors impose within individual KB entries guide the…

The Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD, pronounced “squared”) project is intended to produce a suite of curated, targeted HTRC (HathiTrust Research Center) worksets and illustrative, reusable research models that demonstrate the collaborative workset-building, textual analysis, workflow development, and dataset creation activities typically carried out by…

Music prints and manuscripts created over the past thousand years sit on the shelves of libraries and museums around the globe. As these organizations digitize their collections, images of these scores are increasingly accessible online. However, the musical content remains difficult to search.

Google Books and HathiTrust have already made it possible to search the content of text…

Time affects information retrieval in many ways. Collections of documents change as new items are indexed. The content of documents themselves may change. Users submit queries at particular moments in time. And perhaps most importantly, people’s assessment of a document’s relevance to a query is often time-dependent. For example, searchers of news archives might seek information on a past…

Textual Geographies uses named entity recognition and geolocation to extract place names from multilingual (English, German, Spanish, and Chinese) printed volumes held by the HathiTrust digital library and to associate those names with detailed geographic information. The project corpus currently includes about 10 million volumes published between 1700 and the present day.

Scholarly publications today are still mostly disconnected from the underlying data and code used to produce the published results and findings, despite an increasing recognition of the need to share all aspects of the research process. As data become more open and transportable, a second layer of research output has emerged, linking research publications to the associated data, possibly along…

Despite the ubiquity of search in many people’s daily lives, a lack of search literacy can make it difficult to find solutions to technical problems, such as completing software-based tasks like troubleshooting program installations. iSchool Professor Michael Twidale and Assistant Professor Max Wilson of the University of Nottingham have received funding from Google for a project that aims to…

This project builds upon, extends, and integrates two developmental research threads within the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). The first thread originates from work that was conducted in the Workset Collections for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA): Prototyping Project. The second thread continues the work of…