HTRC API

• HathiTrust Digital Library

• HathiTrust Research Center

  • The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus.

  • Log in with your partner institution (SMU) account to access the largest number of volumes and features.

  • Click here for a list of HTRC tutorials to walk you through the steps for using HTRC tools and data.

HTRC for Text Analysis

• HTRC Algorithms are web-based, click-and-run tools to perform computational text analysis on volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

• In a basic text analysis workflow, a researcher:

  • Gathers digitized text (text that has been scanned and OCR-ed) Note: OCR (Optical character recognition) refers to the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

  • Applies computational methods to that text, such as word counts, classification techniques, and topic modeling

  • And then analyzes the results generated by the algorithm or technique

• HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enters the workflow at the points of providing digitized text at scale from HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) and providing tools and services that enable computational research.

• The researcher, of course, still brings her own analysis to bear on the results.

API (application programming interface)

An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs or components to communicate with each other.

Additional Explanation form technology companies:

• Postman: video explanation of API, Text explanation of API

• IBM: text explanation of API

Example APIs: loc.gov

• For example, look at these pages from the Library of Congress

• The main page is meant for people to interact with.

• The APIs for LoC.gov “makes information available via a series of application programming interfaces (APIs)” it is meant to retrieve information from Loc.gov in a way that is formatted for a machine and for a programming interface.

• Library of Congress Data Exploration

HTRC Extracted Features (EF) API

The HTRC Extracted Features Dataset v.2.0 is composed of page-level features for 17.1 million volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library. This version contains non-consumptive features for both public-domain and in-copyright books. Features include part-of-speech tagged term token counts, header/footer identification, marginal character counts, and much more.

• HTRC Extracted Features (EF) Dataset

• A full explanation of the dataset’s features, motivation, and creation is available at the EF Dataset documentation page: HTRC Extracted Features (EF) Documentation

• EF API

Worksets

• Ready-Made Featured Worksets

TORCHLITE

• TORCHLITE Hackathon Handbook

• Torchlite API Documentation

• Possible Projects

• Sample Creations

All HTRC Tutorials

• A comprehensive list of all HTRC tutorials to walk you through the steps for using HTRC tools and data.

Further Learning

• APIs

• Library Carpentry lesson on fetching data from APIs.

Some content in this session based on HTRC Digging Deeper, Reaching Further used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.