A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference called Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. This (free!) conference was very stimulating, but my real take away was in regards to "next generation" library catalogs. From the end of my blog posting documenting the experience:
Just as importantly, the presentations given at this meeting
demonstrate the maturity of the digital humanities. These things
are not just toys but practical tools for evaluating (mostly)
texts. Given the increasing amount of full text available in
library collections, I see very little reason why these sorts of
digital humanities applications could not be incorporate into
library collections and services. Collect full text content.
Index it. Provide access to the index. Get back a set of search
results. Select one or more items. Read them. Select one or more
items again, and then select an option such as graph analogies,
graph phonemes, or list common phrases between texts. People need
to do more than read the texts. People need to use the texts, to
analyze them, to compare & contrast them with other texts. The
tools described in this conference demonstrate that such things
are more than possible. All that has to be done is to integrate
them into our current (library) systems.
http://tinyurl.com/yc2u4ls
In today's environment where indexers are better tools for finding information than databases, and where recommendations are seen as more useful than controlled vocabulary terms, our library catalogs need to go beyond what they are today. I believe that niche is in putting to use the items in our collections. Putting them into the context of the user and allowing the user to manipulate them in any number of meaningful ways. The things described at the Digital Humanities and Computer Science conference represent just such a applications.
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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Mon Dec 07 2009 - 08:45:47 EST