Harvard Library Hackathon: A Concept Search Engine for Literature and the Humanities

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Where? Cabot Library, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
When? March 29th at 3pm until March 30th at 3pm
What to bring? Your laptop

We're excited to announce Harvard Library's upcoming hackathon! We're convening a crack group of coders, designers, and humanities researchers from Harvard and other universities in the area to develop a concept search engine. What is concept search, you ask? It's a more sophisticated way of sifting through large collections of digitized texts - Google Books, HathiTrust, etc. You can read about it by copying this link into your browser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_search. .

We'll be working with material from the period of the American Revolution, but the advances we make will be applicable to other databases in English, history, the sciences - you name it! By contributing to this project, not only will you be able to include an impressive line on your résumé, but you'll also have the chance to network with some of the best minds at Harvard and MIT, and to make a real difference to the next generation of library discovery. Not only that, did we mention there's free food?

Don't think you have the technical chops? No worries. We've outlined a number of different project activities, from branding to research testing to website development (see more on this below). If you're in the humanities, you can even test it out for your own research. The bottom line: no coding experience is required (although if you have some, it's very, very welcome).

We'll contact you closer to the date of the event with more information about the schedule, the specific working groups, how to access the data, etc.

Any other questions or comments? Contact Stephen Osadetz at osadetz@fas.harvard.edu

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List all CS and Humanities courses, including History, you have taken (optional):

Please detail any other relevant skills you have (optional):

Please select all the working groups that interest you (required): *

1. Search Development: We've already got our search engine running, but we need your help to make it better. This is definitely one of the more technically-oriented working groups. We're seeking to restructure our search algorithm using Elastic Search, so that it provides flexible, real-time results.

2. Website Development: This group will work to develop a rudimentary website that makes the search engine available to researchers across Harvard. You'll have the chance to design all sorts of bells and whistles. Coders and designers welcome! (If you sign up for this group, we'll also invite you to a preliminary planning meeting in late March.

3. Corpus Enrichment: We've got a lot of data - pretty much everything published in English in the eighteenth century - but it's messy. We need your help to clean it up, develop powerful new search filters, reconcile metadata with Wikidata entities, and key the search results to our library holdings. Coders are welcome, as is anyone with a hankering to dig into some library metadata!

4. Data Visualization and Analytic-Tool Development: Our search engine provides so much information that it can be a bit overwhelming for new users. Help them out by developing a set of robust visualization tools! This could include PCAs, maps, and timelines. Coders and designers welcome, especially if you have experience with applications like Tableau.

5. Research Exploration: If you're a student or researcher in the humanities, this group is likely the one for you! We need you to try out our search engine on your own project. The goal here is twofold: 1) to help you identify books that are relevant to your own research; and 2) to develop compelling use cases, so that, when we take our work to the press, we can demonstrate what this search engine is capable of!

6. Design and Branding: The core team working on this project is made up of coders and literary historians. We're not exactly visually inclined. We need your help to brand our search engine, develop its visual identity, and create thoughtfully designed explanatory materials.

7. I can't attend this time, but please keep me informed about similar events in the future.

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