Seminar 5 coordinator: U-M Professor Christi Merrill (Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature)
Co-organized with: Barbara Alvarez (U-M Library), Jeremy York (U-M School of Information), Michael Furlough (Executive Director, HathiTrust), and Heather Christenson (Collections, HathiTrust), who will be speaking at the webinar on February 18, 2022).
Speakers will also include: Sayan Bhattacharyya (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Leigh Billings (UM Library), and Glen Layne-Worthey (HathiTrust Research Center), as well as partners from Google Books Ben Bunnell and Reeve Ingle who have been involved with the digitization project.
The February 18th zoom event will also include lightning talks by researchers and instructors describing their engagements with specific examples in the HathiTrust repository written in non-roman writing systems, such as Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Ladino, Panjabi, Persian, Russian, and Urdu.
Throughout the day we will get behind-the-scenes looks at what led to the development of the HathiTrust Digital Library, especially materials available in languages in HathiTrust taught at the University of Michigan and supported by the Language Resource Center. Presenters will focus especially on examples in Less Commonly Taught Languages, reflecting on the particular challenges of discovering and working with source texts and translations in non-roman writing systems which are difficult to catalog and to render searchable using OCR (optical character recognition).
A follow-up seminar in Fall 2022 will feature tools developed by Translation Networks (an interdisciplinary digital studies initiative funded by an MCube grant at the University of Michigan) and how they might be used with HathiTrust sources, in collaboration across three HathiTrust sites in the midwest (Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois at Champaign-Urbana). Together we aim to make these materials more accessible to a broader range of users and to encourage exploration of HathiTrust as another site of translation.
Program & Videos
11:00-11:15 Introductions, overview of the seminar by Christi Merrill
11:15-12:45 History of HathiTrust and the Google digitization project, followed by Q&A
Speakers during this section include:
Mike Furlough
Ben Bunnell, “Google Books, Past and Present”
Reeve Ingle, “OCR Developments in Google Books”
Heather Christenson
12:45-1:30 Lunch break
1:30-2:45 Lightning talks followed by Q&A
2:45 – 3:00 Break
3:00 – 4:30 Using HathiTrust for Research: Practicalities and Possibilities
Barbara Alvarez & Leigh Billings
Sayan Bhattacharyya
Glen Layne-Worthey
Jeremy York
4:30 Announcement of a virtual telephone game featuring HathiTrust sources
