Future Considerations and Applications

One strength of timeline searching is its ability to provide further sites of concentration for research across a database, especially helpful for literary researchers, or anyone who hopes to gain data for a large-scale project which makes use of keywords across a timeline. As Kuan-Yu Chen, Luesak Luesukprasert, and Seng-cho T. Chou suggest, timeline searching may be more helpful than single-term searching, since researchers can infer when a term was most popular in usage. For the purpose of writing review articles, this timeline data can be helpful in tracking changes in usage, as well as trends in conversations.

Moreover, as Sayan Bhattacharyya, Christi Merrill, Peter Organisciak, Benjamin Schmidt, Loretta Auvil, Erez Lieberman Aiden, and J. Stephen Downie show, the Bookworm tool is well situated to allow analysis of big data in digital humanities classrooms without requiring further mastery of technical tools.

While HathiTrust’s Bookworm tool may be a good entry point to facilitate further understanding textual analysis, as it certainly was for me, it would be more helpful to pursue textual research in conjunction with other tools from the HathiTrust arsenal of research tools.

In the future, I will be using the Bookworm tool in my classes, as I show my students some potential ways to study text across history.