John Burns
Director, Advanced Technology Research
JSTOR
Large-scale digital resources such as JSTOR are core elements of the academic community’s emerging 21st-century infrastructure. Used primarily for ensuring preservation and easy access to scholarly materials, these resources are now becoming springboards for technological innovation using text-mining and other techniques. In the past two years, portions of the JSTOR dataset have been used by researchers around the world as a base for projects like developing algorithms to generate topic maps spanning hundreds of years of scientific research and exploring how key descriptive terms in disciplines like astronomy have evolved from the mechanics of building telescopes to the analysis of stellar and galactic lifecycles.
JSTOR is bringing together many of its new advanced technology initiatives in a site called Showcase, which will encourage text mining and other innovative uses of the JSTOR dataset, preview resulting developments and applications to users, and create a cross-institutional community for sharing project information, software, and ideas. This presentation will include a preview of Showcase as well as Data for Research, a set of Web tools designed to allow for the visual exploration of large-scale datasets beginning with JSTOR. The session will also include a description of some of the uses being made of these resources by various partner institutions including Princeton, University of Liverpool, and University of Washington.
Handout (PDF)
