HathiTrust Digital Library Research Articles

The first English textbook of plastic surgery—William (Jerry) Moore

The nineteenth century bore witness to a remarkable proliferation of reconstructive literature in Europe, based on procedures originally described in India and Italy. Despite the publication of a successful forehead flap in England in 1816, texts exclusively dedicated to the field of plastic surgery were relatively scarce in the English-speaking world. The authors sought to identify the first English textbook entirely devoted to plastic surgery. A comprehensive examination was undertaken, spanning various databases encompassing medical, medical humanities and historical domains (PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Anthropology, JSTOR, Encyclopedia of Ancient History), as well as an extensive perusal of materials housed in the State Library of Victoria, the University of Melbourne and the HathiTrust Digital Library. The scope of this search was confined to publications predating Harold Gillies' influential 1920 textbook. Within this vast literary landscape, an Australian surgeon named William Moore emerged as a figure of notable significance, authoring the first textbook of plastic surgery in English in 1899. Moore's legacy as a pioneering surgeon ahead of his era is undeniable. Yet, various factors conspired to obscure his rightful place in the annals of surgical history.

“I didn’t know there were so many kinds of people and so many sorts of provincialism in the world’’: Tracking Provincialism Through the Nineteenth-Century Corpus

Abstract Beginning with a full text search for the term ‘provincialism’ across all entries in the OED Online, this article tracks ‘provincialism’ through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. The focus is not on a close reading of a small number of novels, a novel subgenre, or iterations of a single novel, but on a close reading of multiple short, references to the term ‘provincialism’ drawn from a large number of nineteenth-century digitized novels. Attention is concentrated on the textually small, the fleeting yet potent uses of the term deployed by nineteenth-century novelists writing in a mass cultural medium with a local and global reach. The findings offer up a relational and multidimensional picture of the term aggregated from the textually small, as it plays out in relation to class, gender, the city, the four nations of the UK, the British Empire and the wider world.

Women’s Words and the Words of Women in the Oxford English Dictionary

Abstract This article explores datasets curated from the citation evidence in successive editions and revisions of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884–2022), which have been annotated to reflect the gender of the authors and other bibliographical metadata. This exploration aims both to supplement the historical account of the dictionary’s uses of female-authored quotation sources, correcting and elaborating some figures which have previously been reported, and to provide a contemporary account of women’s representation in OED Online, using the revision published in June 2022. In seeking to establish a more objective and empirical basis for judging ‘representativeness’, I treat the OED both as a self-contained bibliographical and lexicographical work, and comparatively, against other comprehensive or very large bibliographical corpora, namely the Garside et al. surveys of early English novels, the Library of Congress Catalog, and the HathiTrust Digital Library. The OED data studied here represents a significant (if restricted) subset, rather than a representative sample, of the OED corpus as a whole: modern (post-1700) quotations from books appearing with their author’s name in the OED evidence are considered. While this approach does not claim to make an objectively complete tally of every woman-authored quotation collected in the OED, it does enable a more detailed and accurate account than has previously been possible, and allows for a number of consistent cross-comparisons. A companion document of Supplementary Data & Notes, available at The Review of English Studies online, describes in technical terms how the data was compiled and the processes and principles by which it was annotated.

“Welcome to pure food city”: tracing discourses of health in the promotional publications of the Postum Cereal Company, 1920-1925

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate three promotional publications produced by the Postum Cereal Company – A Trip Through Postumville (1920), How I Make Postum (1924) and The Wonderful Lunch Boxes (1925) – with the aim of understanding how language and other semiotic resources are used to promote its products as good and healthy choices.Design/methodology/approachThe three publications were collected from the HathiTrust Digital Library and University of South Florida Tampa Special Collections. They were subjected to multimodal critical discourse analysis to tease out their subtle characteristics and how a combination of language, image, colour, typography and composition are used to represent certain ideas and values related to health and well-being.FindingsThe publications subscribe to three distinct genres – “inside the factory”, “friendly spokesperson” and “fictional world” – each of which are aimed at different target audiences. The first seeks to promote Postum as an open and transparent company; the second to promote Postum as a company that cares about its consumers; and the third to promote the health benefits of Postum in a fun and accessible manner. Nonetheless, they are united in their overall objective to link the regular consumption of Postum as essential for good health.Originality/valueTo date, few studies have been conducted on the Postum Cereal Company, while the limited research conducted on promotional publications has tended to overlook discourses of health and well-being. The three genres outlined in this study, thus, have the potential to foster a reappraisal of promotional publications and showcase their ability to offer new understandings on historical approaches to marketing, particularly the link with health and science.

MultiHATHI: A Complete Collection of Multilingual Prose Fiction in the HathiTrust Digital Library

This dataset provides detailed metadata on ca. 10.2 million works of fiction and non-fiction written after 1799 in 521 different languages available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The dataset bolsters the May 2022 Hathifile by supplying missing predicted fiction tags with a bespoke BERT-based multilingual classifier. Our classifier completes the catalogue with an additional 400,000 non-English volumes predicted to be works of fiction, capturing 95% of all works presently provided by HathiTrust. We provide each work with metadata including the work’s genre at the level of fiction or non-fiction, length in pages, original language, and the year the work was published. With a total page count of ca. 1.4 billion pages, our dataset provides researchers with a substantial source of non-English modern literature. We also present insight into how multilingual classifiers can be trained with monolingual data, itself a discovery with implications for the study of lower resource languages. We hope our provisions will accelerate empirical research into non-English prose and literature.

From Manual to Digital: Women's Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Digital resources like the HathiTrust Digital Library, Early English Books Online, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online are increasingly central to humanities scholarship, a trend that has only accelerated as academic jobs disappear, institutional budgets tighten, and an ongoing global pandemic limits travel and access to archives. These electronic resources are not simply a panacea in precarious times, however; they are the product of a global information economy that depends on uncredited, invisible, and underpaid labor. The academic humanities are complicit in exploiting and erasing these technology workers, as a growing body of investigative research has shown. This essay contributes a new case study of an offshore outsourcing project commissioned by and for eighteenth-century scholars: the digitization of The London Stage, 1660–1800 by China Data Systems Corporation in 1970. That electronic transcription, which continues to underpin the present-day London Stage Database, was performed by women keypunchers whose labor was systematically feminized, racialized, and devalued in advertisements and corporate media. Drawing connections to the rhetoric around projects like Google Books and the Text Creation Partnership today, I highlight the recurrent figure of the hand and its vexed role in policing the boundaries between agential and alienated labor. Turning to the period that gave rise to contemporary understandings of intellectual property, I conclude by examining a receipt recording three copyright sales between Susanna Centlivre and Edmund Curll. In this ephemeral manuscript, I find a story richly suggestive of how we might reimagine scholarly labor and knowledge work in our moment of technocapitalism.

Uncovering Black Fantastic: Piloting A Word Feature Analysis and Machine Learning Approach for Genre Classification

AbstractGiven the size of digital library collections and the inconsistencies in their genre‐related bibliographic metadata, as digital libraries grow and their contents are opened for computational analysis, finding materials of interest becomes a major challenge. This challenge increases for sub‐genres and other categories of text data that are less distinct from the whole. This project pilots machine learning methods and word feature analysis for identifying Black Fantastic genre texts within the HathiTrust Digital Library. These texts are sometimes referred to as “Afrofuturism” but more commonly today described as “Black Fantastic,” in which African Diaspora artists and creators engage with the intersections of race and technology in their works with a primary focus on world‐building. Black Fantastic texts pose a challenge to genre classification, as they incorporate aspects of science fiction and fantasy with typical characteristics of African Diaspora‐produced literature. This paper presents and reports on results from a pilot predictive modeling process to computationally identify Black Fantastic texts using curated word feature sets for each class of data: general English‐language fiction, Black‐authored fiction, and Black Fantastic fiction.

Protecting Indigenous Music in the Public Domain: HathiTrust Digital Library Case Study

This study examined problems associated with unregulated access to Indigenous music materials in the public domain, utilizing the HathiTrust Digital Library as a case study. It focused on music materials and employed content analysis, and descriptive statistics as major methodological instruments. This study revealed the presence of musical notation as a primary condition rendering materials vulnerable to potential exploitation. This study confirmed that unregulated access may expose sensitive content protected under NAGPRA. Methodologically, this study offered a model of critical assessment of multi-institutional digitized collections. Substantively, it proposed strategies to support the protection of Indigenous content in HathiTrust.

Contributing to HathiTrust on a Smaller Scale

In 2021, the Oklahoma State University Library contributed titles from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in their regional depository library collection to the HathiTrust Digital Library. A coordinated effort, this allowed the university library to expand the mission and outreach of the Federal Depository Library Program and also disseminate information and further education as part of the responsibility of a land-grant institution. Contributing Bureau of Indian Affairs materials enhanced the OSU Library’s role as a preservation partner with the Federal Depository Library Program, supported the state with the importance of Native American tribes in Oklahoma, and complemented the goals of the HathiTrust Federal Documents Collection Framework as a key agency to complete as to a comprehensive collection.

New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers, 1931—2020

The New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers (1931–2020) contains three related datasets. The first dataset provides a tabular representation of the hardcover fiction bestseller list of The New York Times every week between 1931 and 2020. The second dataset provides title-level data for every unique title that appeared on the hardcover fiction bestseller list during this time period. The third dataset provides HathiTrust Digital Library identifiers for every unique title that appeared on the hardcover fiction bestseller list and that also has a corresponding volume in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Moving Past Metadata: Improving Digital Libraries with Content‐Based Methods

AbstractThe growth of text mining and corpus analytic scholarship over large digital libraries brings to light the issues created by text duplication and variation within collections that are not adequately addressed in metadata practices. The SaDDL project was a study examining text duplication and similarity in massive digital library collections. Using the HathiTrust Digital Library, this project aims to reduce the bias that duplication gives rise to. We present the content‐based methods of the project, employing a convolutional neural network classification approach, as well as SaDDL's outcomes. The datasets provided by the project will assist in improving cataloging practice and aid scholars in using large text corpora in research.

Giving shape to large digital libraries through exploratory data analysis

AbstractThe emergence of large multi‐institutional digital libraries has opened the door to aggregate‐level examinations of the published word. Such large‐scale analysis offers a new way to pursue traditional problems in the humanities and social sciences, using digital methods to ask routine questions of large corpora. However, inquiry into multiple centuries of books is constrained by the burdens of scale, where statistical inference is technically complex and limited by hurdles to access and flexibility. This work examines the role that exploratory data analysis and visualization tools may play in understanding large bibliographic datasets. We present one such tool, HathiTrust+Bookworm, which allows multifaceted exploration of the multimillion work HathiTrust Digital Library, and center it in the broader space of scholarly tools for exploratory data analysis.

Exploring the Impact of Digitization on Print Usage

Librarians and administrators speculate that the digitization and access of items through the HathiTrust Digital Library may reduce or eliminate demand for the corresponding print content. This belief feeds into a perception that monographs housed in academic libraries and delivered via such services are ripe for deduplication or outright withdrawal, yet other institutions may remain dependent upon those holding titles to provide print-based access for their patrons. Embracing HathiTrust’s emerging Shared Print Monograph Program, more than seventy-nine member institutions committed to retain print monographs that correspond to those digitized from their collections. Putting aside concerns expressed by some about the meaningfulness of those commitments, not all members made such commitments. Moreover, retention commitments are not always publicly displayed, leading to scenarios in which such commitments may be used by other institutions to withdraw from their collections, based on these holdings. This paper provides a data-driven examination of the use of one research library’s print items that correspond to the digital materials deposited into the HathiTrust, detailing both the results and the process by which data was gathered, managed, and digested to yield the results.

HathiTrust Post45 Fiction Dataset

This dataset contains metadata and HathiTrust IDs for fiction held by the HathiTrust Digital Library published between 1945 and 2013. The HathiTrust IDs can be used to computationally access a list of words for each page for each volume, which can enable many kinds of computational text analysis. The dataset also contains ISBSNs, OCLC numbers, and other related OCLC information (such as the number of holdings of each title across WorldCat libraries) for volumes where this information could be identified.

John H. Patterson and the early sales practices of NCR

Purpose This paper aims to explore not only the greatness of Patterson but also some of the mistakes he made along the way. Design/methodology/approach The study traces the career of John Patterson, founder and president of the National Cash Register (NCR) from 1884 to 1922. Data from many different sources, some only recently available through the HathiTrust Digital Library, are analyzed to provide a systematic and focused examination of Patterson’s greatness, as well as some errors in judgment he during his lengthy leadership at NCR. Findings John Patterson recognized the potential development of a new global industry before it existed and went to work creating it. After he bought the original patents for the cash register, he spent huge sums on research and development and secured hundreds of additional patents on the device. He also spent a fortune on educational advertising to create market demand where none previously existed and invested heavily in developing his salesforce through a strong focus on training, professionalism and high commissions. He also engaged in many unsavory sales practices to try to keep others from encroaching on what he considered his exclusive right to the cash register market. At one point, he was convicted in a criminal proceeding for those efforts and sentenced to prison. Originality/value This is the first paper to provide a balanced review of Patterson’s contributions to the business history of that era from a sales and marketing perspective. The paper may be of interest to marketing scholars and practitioners, as well as business historians.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Wendy Pfeffer This volume of Tenso was produced in 2020, a year that, as I draft these words, augurs to be as weighty as 1347 and 1348 were for the medieval world. The earlier years saw the ravages in Western Europe of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic and pneumonic plague; 2020 has become the year of SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), the name of the virus that has caused the pandemic disease identified as COVID-19. Tenso has represented and served as a voice for the community of Occitan scholars since its first issue in 1986–1987. How COVID-19 may change that world is hard to know as I write. What is clear is that the emergency has severely limited scholarly access to libraries, though it has expanded, at least temporarily, scholarly access to online materials, such as those posted by the HathiTrust Digital Library, normally accessible only via partner institutions. This volume serves as a special issue, edited by Daniel O'Sullivan, who organized two panels at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2019—oh, the days when scholars could meet in person—on the theme of Thibaut de Champagne and the troubadours. Dan's introduction sets that stage separately. This issue also includes two brief pieces relating to scholar Jean-Claude Dinguirard (1940–1983), who deserves more recognition than he may have received during his too-short lifetime. His exceptional work in Occitan ranged from linguistic studies of Gascon to work on proverbs and medieval literature, and included translations into Occitan. His son has created a web site, described here, which will be of great interest to Occitan scholars, as the site makes available the works of the universitari tolosenc. In parallel, Pierre Escudé describes efforts to make Dinguirard's works available again in print. The genre of the Op-Ed is continued in Tenso 36, with a different team of scholars offering their perspectives on directions for Occitan studies. Bill Burgwinkle and Hervé Lieutard each [End Page iv] offer insights on new areas worthy of exploration by current and future Occitanists. Some members of the Tenso bibliographic team have expressed regret that their work is less complete than they might have wished, because of the pandemic. No apologies are accepted. The Web is an incredible tool, even as hard copies have proven harder to obtain in 2020 (let us now praise the work of Interlibrary Loan Librarians throughout the world). I propose a round of applause for our bibliographers and discographer for their continued and unstinting efforts to let the scholarly community know what is being published, in print and online, relating to our fields of studies. Though Tenso's bibliographers may not have been able to work in 2020 as they usually have, they offer here their always excellent research. As for works omitted this year, they will be incorporated into annual bibliographies in years to come, as has always been the case. One last observation: this volume includes two necrologies, one for Xavier Ravier, who had two passions, linguistics (principally Occitan dialectology and onomastics) and verse, which he knew as a critic and as a poet. Samuel Rosenberg's fame may be greater in the community of Old French scholars than among Occitanists, despite his significant work in our discipline. For me, Sam was a mentor and a friend. On his retirement, freed from the constraints of teaching and committee work, he engaged ever more actively in scholarship and translation, serving as a model for us all to his last days. COVID-19 has forced many of us into some form of "retirement" or confinement. Sam's career demonstrates that while such a retreat brings deprivations, it can also be filled with opportunities. Wendy Pfeffer Editor-in-Chief WORK CITED <https://www.hathitrust.org/>, consulted 14 August 2020. Copyright © 2021 Société Guilhem IX

Applying BIBFRAME in large‐scale digital libraries: The HathiTrust Research Center's experience

AbstractIn 2018 the HathiTrust Research Center built an experimental triplestore of BIBFRAME RDF from the HathiTrust Digital Library's MARC metadata catalog. This poster describes processes used to convert from MARC to BIBFRAME, to enrich descriptions with links, and to visualize worksets using RDF created.

NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

This report accompanies a collection of 210,305 volumes, predicted to be fiction, that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. We divide the collection into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where books written by men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different subsets allows us to assess the resilience or fragility of recent quantitative arguments about literary history. Readers can also simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library.

The HathiTrust Digital Library’s potential for musicology research

The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is one of the largest digital libraries in the world, containing seventeen million volumes from the collections of major academic and research libraries. In this paper, we discuss the HTDL’s potential for musicology research by providing a bibliometric analysis of the collection as a whole, and of the music materials in particular. A series of case studies illustrates the kinds of musicological research that may be conducted using the HTDL. We highlight several opportunities for improvement and discuss promising future directions for new knowledge creation through the processing and analysis of large amounts of retrospective data. The HTDL presents significant new opportunities to the study of music that will continue to expand as data, metadata and collection enhancements are introduced.

Encoding Newton’s Alchemical Library: Integrating Traditional Bibliographic and Modern Computational Methods

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (http://chymistry.org) project team has digitized and encoded, following the TEI Guidelines, the complete corpus of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts, which total more than two thousand pages and over one million words. Newton cited more than five thousand published and unpublished works in these manuscripts; many of his annotations reference items in his own library, as he was an exceptionally dedicated reader of alchemical texts. Newton’s extensive citations and annotations provide a window into his alchemical research and practices, and serve as the basis for our authoritative bibliography of his alchemical sources. The bibliography is being developed as both a stand-alone reference work and an integrated resource with the alchemical manuscripts, providing additional context for Newton’s citations and florilegia. Once finished, the bibliography will provide complete, structured citations—which often would appear very abbreviated or incomplete in the manuscripts—that can be formatted to comply with modern bibliographic conventions and bibliographic management systems. Our bibliography will also link to digitized online versions of the source texts available through Early English Books Online, HathiTrust Digital Library, and other digital repositories. The citations include quasi-facsimile title page transcription, a technique used for bibliographic description of rare books, to enable richer forms of citation analysis. By analyzing the citations, we will be able to date Newton’s manuscripts, cluster manuscripts that cite the same or related sources, and, ultimately, generate network graphs that will reveal connections between the cited authors and texts and how they influence Newton’s own ideas and work.