On September 9th, 2019, Prof. J. Stephen Downie will visit our research group and give a talk titled ‘‘Extracted Features: HathiTrust and Beyond’’. The talk will take place in our seminar room (FC 0.10) at 2 p.m. and is open to all students and faculty members.
J. Stephen Downie is the Associate Dean for Research and a Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Downie is also the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC).
The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) contains nearly 17 million volumes (approximately 6 billion pages) digitized by the Google Books project, the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, and more than 60 US research libraries. HTDL offers several discovery and access services, such as full-text search for the entire collection. However, unfortunately, around 11 million HTDL volumes face copyright restrictions and cannot be shared directly with users. To overcome this problem, the HathiTrust Research Center is creating a set of “non-consumptive research” services to make these closed materials more open and thus useful to scholars.
In his upcoming talk, Professor Downie will give an overview of the HathiTrust Digital Library and several ongoing projects. He will introduce such non-consumptives services as “Data Capsules,” “Extracted Features” and the “Bookworm + HathiTrust” tool.
His talk will pay particular attention to the opportunities and challenges surrounding the creation, use and sharing of Extracted Features. Each HTRC service is designed to open new points of access to otherwise closed data, while still respecting all copyright limitations. Examples of real-world Digital Humanities research projects and services that have been using the HTRC Extracted Features data will highlighted.
Dr. Downie represents the HTRC on the NOVEL(TM) text mining project and the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project, both funded by the SSHRC Partnership Grant programme. These projects all share a common thread of striving to provide large-scale analytic access to copyright-restricted cultural data.
Dr. Downie has also been very active in the establishment of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community through his ongoing work with the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conferences. He was ISMIR’s founding President and recently served on the ISMIR board. Professor Downie holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition) along with a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
