Big data at scale for digital humanities: An architecture for the HathiTrust research center

Big Data in the humanities is a new phenomenon that is expected to revolutionize the process of humanities research. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a cyberinfrastructure to support humanities research on big humanities data. The HathiTrust Research Center has been designed to make the technology serve the researcher to make the content easy to find, to make the research tools efficient and effective, to allow researchers to customize their environment, to allow researchers to combine their own data with that of the HTRC, and to allow researchers to contribute tools. The architecture has multiple layers of abstraction providing a secure, scalable, extendable, and generalizable interface for both human and computational users. Stacy T. Kowalczyk Dominican University, USA Yiming Sun Indiana University, USA Zong Peng Indiana University, USA Beth Plale Indiana University, USA Aaron Todd Indiana University, USA Loretta Auvil University of Illinois, USA Craig Willis University of Illinois, USA Jiaan Zeng Indiana University, USA Milinda Pathirage Indiana University, USA Samitha Liyanage Indiana University, USA Guangchen Ruan Indiana University, USA J. Stephen Downie University of Illinois, USA DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4699-5.ch011