Indiana University's Data To Insight Center (D2I) will lead a $600,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to fund the first investigation of non-consumptive research for a major mass digitised collection of content. Partners with D2I on this include the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and the University of Michigan's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Non-consumptive research involves computational analysis of one or more books without the researcher having the ability to reassemble the collection. Rather than reading the material, researchers use specialised algorithms to analyse text as a massive data set. The Sloan grant will help ensure that work can be conducted in a secure environment. According to principal investigator Beth Plale, this funding will help pursue a research track around non-consumptive research uses of the HathiTrust digital corpus. Plale is professor in the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing and director of the Data To Insight Center.
In some cases, HTRC would own the algorithms used by researchers, so HTRC needs to examine the security requirements for users, the algorithms and the data, all within the context of using the suite of algorithms available in the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).
In other cases, researchers would own and submit their own algorithms for use. The Sloan Foundation funding will be used to create a 'data capsule framework' prototype that would allow the scholar the freedom to experiment with new algorithms on a huge body of information, but with technological 'trust but verify' mechanisms in place to confirm compliance with non-consumptive research policy.
The HathiTrust repository contains almost 8.6 million digitised volumes, and about 2.2 million of those - roughly 26 percent - are in the public domain and currently available for non-consumptive research.
The model for implementing non-consumptive research is founded on a principle of trust but verify where the researcher should generally be trusted to do the right thing and be given the freedoms to carry out creative research, but with mechanisms in place to ensure good behaviour and adherence to rules. The security aspects of the project leverage research by Atul Prakash of University of Michigan, also a principal investigator on the project with Plale.
Leveraging cyber infrastructure at Indiana University, including FutureGrid, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the HTRC will provision a secure computational and data environment.
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