The University of Maryland is part of an international and multi-institutional research team recently awarded a two-year $1,000,000 grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a humanities text-mining project called “Metadata Offer New Knowledge” (MONK). The project, directed by John Unsworth at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, also includes faculty, staff, and students from Northwestern University, McMaster University, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Alberta, as well as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Locally for Maryland, MONK’s work represents a collaboration between the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), where MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM–the Maryland MONK team leader–is Associate Director, as well as the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) under the auspices of CATHERINE PLAISANT, and contributions from MARTHA NELL SMITH of the Maryland English department. Graduate students, visiting researchers, or full-time staff from MITH, HCIL, and the English department are also all playing key roles.
The foundation for MONK is the work and progress of two existing research projects: the Nora Project, a multi-institutional endeavor in which the principals at Maryland also participated, and WordHoard, directed by Martin Mueller and based at Northwestern University. Both Nora and WordHoard apply similar text-mining techniques to digital humanities collections, though the focus of Nora has been on 18th and 19th-century British and American literature, and WordHoard has concentrated on earlier texts, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, and early Greek epic literature.
MONK will bring together these two projects to create an inclusive and comprehensive text-mining and text-analysis tool-kit for scholars in the humanities.
Commenting on this work, Unsworth said, “Over the last decade, many millions of dollars have been invested in creating digital library collections: at this point, terabytes of full-text humanities resources are publicly available on the web. Those collections, dispersed across many different institutions (not only libraries but also publishers and search engines) are large enough and rich enough to provide an excellent opportunity for text-mining, and we believe that web-based text-mining tools will make those collections significantly more useful, more informative, and more rewarding for research and teaching.”
The Mellon grant covers two phases of the project. The first phase will combine the texts used as testbeds for both Nora and WordHoard, add additional texts, and develop the infrastructure and interfaces to support analysis and investigation of this testbed. The second phase will investigate social software approaches to allow users to share their text-mining worksets and results. Integral in this phase will be the participation of libraries as test sites for deploying these tools alongside existing collections; partners in this phase will include the libraries at some or all of the institutions participating in MONK.
Information about MONK will be available soon at www.monkproject.org/
This two-year grant begins in January 2007 and will run through January 2009.
