scwared
Home for general documentation about HTRC’s Mellon-funded SCWAReD project.
Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD)
The Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD) project, generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, produced a suite of scholar-curated, targeted worksets of materials from the HathiTrust Digital Library, facilitated by its Research Center (HTRC). HTRC worksets are user-created collections of HathiTrust volumes that can be treated as data and analyzed using a variety of tools and services. Worksets can be shared and cited, contributing to research reproducibility and durable scholarship. In addition to their intrinsic value as focused digital collections, SCWAReD’s enhanced, scholar-curated worksets also serve as illustrative, reusable research models, and include not only the worksets themselves, but also scholarly introductions, derived datasets and related documentation, and research reports, demonstrating the collaborative workset-building, textual analysis, workflow development, and dataset creation activities typically carried out by HTRC.
The special mission of SCWAReD is to highlight and center the work of historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities. For this purpose, a flagship project and four sub-projects were selected competitively; each of them explores new methods for creating, analyzing, and reusing curated digital library collections and the research data derived from them.
Black Books Interactive Project in HathiTrust
HTRC partnered with SCWAReD co-PI Dr. Maryemma Graham and her team at the University of Kansas to develop a flagship research model based on the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW). HBW was founded in 1983 at the University of Mississippi by Dr. Graham, and has been hosted since 1998 at the University of Kansas. Its principal activities include the creation of the largest known bibliographic database of African-American literary texts in existence; a robust program of summer institutes for professional development and student engagement; community building; and research publishing. HBW’s more recent project to create and curate digital full-text versions of works documented in the bibliography are subsumed under the Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP). The motivating question for BBIP is this: How well is the largest known bibliography of African-American authored texts reflected and represented in the largest known academic digital library? With a combination of advanced metadata matching and methods in textual analysis, this SCWAReD flagship project seeks not only to answer this question, but also to remediate some of the gaps that answer reveals, by seeking sources for as many missing texts as possible; developing new ways of incorporating as many of these into the HathiTrust Digital Library as possible; devising new ways to derive data from those texts that cannot be ingested into HathiTrust; and creating SCWARed worksets and research models from all the diverse sources that we’re able to gather.
Projects selected for SCWAReD-funded Advanced Collaborative Support:
Mining the Native American Authored Works in HathiTrust for Insights
Kun Lu, Raina Heaton, and Raymond Orr (University of Oklahoma)
This project compiled a collection of Native American authored works in HathiTrust and applied various text mining methods to the collection to reveal the coverage, subjects, perspectives, and writing styles of Native authors. A list of Native authors and their works was compiled from an existing database created by a member of the project team and from other online resources. This list was aligned with the HathiTrust digital library to create a workset of Native American authored works in HathiTrust for further analysis. Then, a variety of text mining methods will be used to analyze the subjects, topics, language use, and writing styles of Native American authors. Comparative analysis will be carried out to understand the characteristics of this textual community. The project seeks to develop a database of Native American authors and the bibliographic information of their works, create a reusable workset of Native American authored works in HathiTrust, identify potential gaps in the HathiTrust corpus on this textual community, and provide insights into the characteristics of the communities by text mining their works.
The Black Fantastic: Curated Vocabularies, Artifact Analysis and Identification
Clarissa West-White (Bethune Cookman University) and Seretha Williams (Augusta University)
This project focuses on identifying Black Fantastic texts in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The project proposes that characteristics of the Black Fantastic—the cultural production of African Diasporic artists and creators who engage with the intersections of race and technology in their work—exist in historical and current cultural artifacts, including those created by and about future-forward personalities, such as Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. It builds on previous and ongoing work to create a bibliography of the Black Fantastic that is featured in Third Stone Journal. Works in HathiTrust were analyzed along with Black Fantastic artifacts from other collections, such as the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune collection in the Bethune-Cookman University archives. By working across collections, the project seeks to test methods for locating Black Fantastic texts and lives.
Creating Period-Specific Worksets for Latin American Fiction
José Eduardo González (University of Nebraska, Lincoln)
This project created large datasets to research the history of Latin American fiction and question traditional periodization of this literature by attempting to detect the boundaries between literary periods and subgenre distinctions in Latin American fiction. It looks critically at the techniques for detecting genre distinctions that have developed over the last few years and evaluates how they apply to the particular development of Latin American literary system. While many of the subgenres in the English-speaking literary market such as detective fiction, the Gothic novel, and speculative fiction have followers in Latin America, the genres that have traditionally been considered important for the changes in the literary history of the region are less formulaic and more closely linked to national and regional historical and/or social developments. Instead of attempting to identify canonical documents that typify a genre, this project examines how documents diverge from a particular canon in order to explore the social and cultural reasons an author might accept or deviate from a dominant style.
The National Negro Health Digital Project: Recovering and Restoring a Black Public Health Corpus
Kim Gallon (Brown University)
This project draws on HathiTrust’s collection of public health documents on Black health to explore how early twentieth Black public health officials communicated and addressed health disparities that impacted African American communities. The major goal of the project is to create a series of worksets and visualizations that scholars and students of African American health and medicine along with public health experts and physicians can use to deepen historical narratives about Black health that might offer insight into the development of contemporary health communications targeted toward African American communities. The project also establishes some of the research for Technologies of Recovery: Black DH Theory and Praxis, a book in- progress. Finally, the work seeks to fill a gap in the history of African American public health.
SCWAReD Activities, Reports, Presentations, and Publications
View a list of activies resulting from the SCWAReD project.
SCWAReD Staff
John A. Walsh
SCWAReD Principal Investigator
Director, HathiTrust Research Center
Associate Professor, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University
J. Stephen Downie
SCWAReD Co-Principal Investigator
Co-Director, HTRC, HathiTrust Research Center
Associate Dean for Research and Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois
Maryemma Graham
SCWAReD Co-Principal Investigator
Founding Director, Project on the History of Black Writing
Distinguished Professor of English, University of Kansas
Isabella Magni
SCWAReD Co-Investigator, 2022-present
SCWAReD Post-Doctoral Fellow, HTRC, Indiana University, 2021-2022
Lecturer in Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield
Boris Capitanu
Senior Research Developer, HTRC, University of Illinois
Ryan Dubnicek
Digital Humanities Specialist, HTRC, University of Illinois
Jade Harrison
Project Manager, Black Book Interactive Project, University of Kansas
Glen Layne-Worthey
Associate Director for Research Support Services, HTRC, University of Illinois
Ashley Simmons
Archive Coordinator, History of Black Writing, University of Kansas
Janet Swatscheno
Associate Director for Outreach and Education, HTRC, University of Michigan
Brendan Williams-Childs
Collections Assistant, Project on the History of Black Writing, University of Kansas
Acknowlegements
These curated worksets were developed as part of Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Re-use, and Dissemination (SCWAReD, pronounced squared) initiative, generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is the research center of the HathiTrust Digital Library. HTRC receives generous support from the HathiTrust Digital Library, Indiana University, and the University of Illinois.