Use & Understand

Name: Eric Lease Morgan
URL: http://infomotions.com/blog/2011/09/dpla/

The Use & Understand project aims to distinguish the DPLA from other digital libraries, by emphasizing “use & understand.” These processes and functions enable the reader to ask and answer questions of large and small sets of documents relatively easily. Through the use of various text mining techniques, the reader can grasp quickly the content of documents, extract some of their meaning, and evaluate them more thoroughly when compared to the traditional application of metadata. Some of these processes and functions include: word/phrase frequency lists, concordances, histograms illustrating the location of words/phrases in a text, network diagrams illustrating what author says “in the same breath” when they mention a given word, plotting publication dates on a timeline, measuring the weight of a concept in a text, evaluating texts based on parts of speech, supplementing texts with Wikipedia articles, and plotting place names on a world maps. These sorts of tools would help focus the library on optimizing user experience.