a blog by Peter Leonard
In early November I had a chance to travel to South Carolina to attend the Charleston Conference.
Together with colleagues from Yale and ProQuest, I presented a panel on Data Mining on Vendor-Digitized Collections. We focused on our analysis of ProQuest’s Vogue Digital Archive — a collection of every issue since Vogue’s inception in 1892 — as a case study of what libraries and scholars can do with vendor data. Our examples were mostly drawn from our public website that showcases various visual and textual experiments with the Vogue data:
Here’s how we framed the larger issue:
This session delves into the rapidly emerging topic of text and data mining (TDM), from the perspectives of a digital humanist, a librarian, a collection development officer and a product manager for a major vendor of digitized content. We will show concrete examples of TDM on a large vendor-digitized in-copyright collection: the Vogue Archive from ProQuest, with over 400,000 pages of text and images dating from 1892 to the present. Several projects in progress at Yale have illuminated the appeal of TDM applications on Vogue to researchers across disciplines ranging from gender studies to art history to computer science. We will address issues of copyright and licensing, file formats and research platforms, new forms of research enabled by TDM, and how vendors and librarians can work to support digital humanities projects. Session attendees who are new to this topic will learn what TDM is and how they might engage with it in their own work. Audience members who have familiarity with TDM will be encouraged to share their experiences and insights.
After the conference was over I had a chance to enjoy a day in the city free of presentation responsibilities. The weather was very pleasant and the sky cooperated to show off the architecture in its best light: