Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

223
S<strong>in</strong>ce HiTHeR also aimed to provide a comprehensive research platform, they chose to offer several
text-m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g algorithms for their users <strong>in</strong> terms of creat<strong>in</strong>g this “cha<strong>in</strong> of read<strong>in</strong>gs.” In addition, users
could upload their own documents, not just use this tool with NCSE collections.
The HiTHer project quickly discovered, however, that standard comput<strong>in</strong>g environments did not
provide the level of process<strong>in</strong>g power necessary to run these algorithms. To resolve this problem, they
built an <strong>in</strong>frastructure based on high-throughput comput<strong>in</strong>g (HTC) that uses many computational
resources to accomplish a s<strong>in</strong>gle computational task. They made use of the Condor toolkit that let them
rely on two types of computers at K<strong>in</strong>g’s College London, underutilized desktop computers and
dedicated servers. The authors thus assert that HiTHeR “illustrates how e-Humanities centres can be
served by implement<strong>in</strong>g their own local research <strong>in</strong>frastructure, which they can relatively easily build
us<strong>in</strong>g exist<strong>in</strong>g resources like standard desktop networks” (Blanke, Hedges, and Palmer 2009).
Another <strong>in</strong>sight offered by the HiTHeR research group was that for most applications <strong>in</strong> the
humanities, “large comput<strong>in</strong>g power will only be needed to prepare data sets for human analysis”
(Blanke, Hedges, and Palmer 2009). They suggested that for much humanities research, a user would
simply need to call on heavy process<strong>in</strong>g power to analyze a data set once, and would want to spend the
rest of his or her time access<strong>in</strong>g and analyz<strong>in</strong>g the results; <strong>in</strong> other words, most humanists would need
a “create once-read many resources” application environment. This led them to ultimately deploy
HiTHer as a restful web service where humanities scholars could call upon a variety of text-m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g
algorithms and then receive the results <strong>in</strong> a variety of formats (XHTML, Atom, etc.)
The importance of services, or digital tools more specifically, as <strong>in</strong>frastructure has also been discussed
by Geoffrey Rockwell, who provided an overview of the development of <strong>in</strong>frastructure for textual
analysis that <strong>in</strong>cluded the creation of a portal for textual research called TAPoR and the development
of a set of reference tools TAPoRware. 677 The <strong>in</strong>tent was that this portal could be used to discover and
use tools that had been registered by their creators as web services that were runn<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> various
locations. The portal was to provide scholars easy access to already-exist<strong>in</strong>g tools and to support the
registration, creation, and publish<strong>in</strong>g of new services. Currently the portal is be<strong>in</strong>g re<strong>in</strong>vented,
Rockwell reported, s<strong>in</strong>ce many scholars did not f<strong>in</strong>d it easy to use. He also suggested that web services
are often not as reliable as they should be, and that most users require both simplicity and reliability.
“My po<strong>in</strong>t here is that the model was to keep tool development as research but make the research tools
easy to discover and use through portal-like <strong>in</strong>frastructure,” Rockwell expla<strong>in</strong>ed; add<strong>in</strong>g that “a further
paradigm was that tools could be embedded <strong>in</strong> onl<strong>in</strong>e texts as small viral badges, thereby hid<strong>in</strong>g the
portal and foreground<strong>in</strong>g the visible text, an experiment we are just embark<strong>in</strong>g on” (Rockwell 2010).
While Rockwell accentuated that digital tools were an important part of the portal <strong>in</strong>frastructure that at
times needed to be “<strong>in</strong>visible” to make the content primary, he also argued that tool development is an
important part of the humanities research process <strong>in</strong> itself.
Research libraries and digital repositories, as potential key components of cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for the
humanities, will also need to address the complexities of provid<strong>in</strong>g access to both content and services
as part of a larger networked <strong>in</strong>frastructure, accord<strong>in</strong>g to a recent Association of Research Libraries
(ARL) report on digital repository services for research libraries:
… manag<strong>in</strong>g unique content, not just traditional special collections but entirely new k<strong>in</strong>ds of
works and locally-created content, will be an important emphasis for collection and
management. As users exercise new capabilities and require new services, library services will
677 http://portal.tapor.ca and http://taporware.cmaster.ca