Text-Analysis Tools Enhance Use of HathiTrust Materials

Digital access to large bodies of text enables new research uses for the millions of volumes—and billions of words—being digitized from the CIC collections and stored in the HathiTrust Digital Repository.

Corpus linguists, historians, and social scientists can now analyze the evolution of word usage, grammatical conventions, and social interests over time, space, or demographic classes.

To encourage and support this research, the suite of Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) text-analysis tools and resources is now available across the CIC universities, extending the reach of these tools as well as broadening the range of material available to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. MONK is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. Currently stored on servers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, MONK tools and resources are shared in a secure online environment.

“As our libraries lead the way in the evolution from print to digital formats, it will be important to provide the tools and resources needed to fully exploit the functionality of digitized texts we own or license,” said Paula Kaufman, university librarian and dean of libraries for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “By making it possible for scholars at CIC universities to act on the millions of volumes stored in large repositories such as HathiTrust, we are extending innovative opportunities to delve into cultural history as expressed through the published literature of our library collections.”

Because some of these files are licensed content, access is restricted to authenticated users in the CIC. A modest investment by the Library Directors made a small investment to integrate MONK with an identity management framework that allows individuals from each CIC university to securely log into shared applications using their campus identification and password.

The CIC Directors funded the programming needed to provide access to CIC users as prelude to eventual efforts to allow users to apply MONK and similar tools to the millions of volumes in the HathiTrust text corpus.