Scholarly Needs for Text Analysis Resources: A User Assessment Study for the HathiTrust Research Center

Abstract

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is undertaking a study to better understand the needs of current and potential users of the center's tools and services for computational text analysis. In this paper, we report on the results of the first phase of the study, which consisted of interviews with scholars, administrators, and librarians whose work involves text data mining. Our study reveals that text analysis workflows are specific to the individual research project and are often nonlinear. In spite of, and in some cases because of, the wealth of textual data available, scholars find it most difficult to locate, access, and curate textual data for their research. While the goals of the study directly relate to research and development for the HTRC, our results are useful for other large-scale data providers developing solutions for allowing computational access to their content.