Digital humanities scholars from NC State University and Texas A&M University are launching a new tool that will help researchers sift through hundreds of thousands of archives and articles and images and display results in infographic formats. The new tool, called BigDIVA, will be formally unveiled later this month.
“Our goal in developing BigDIVA was to create a tool to help us explore our cultural heritage and facilitate scholarship in fields ranging from literature and religion to art and world history,” Tim Stinson, an associate professor of English at NC State and one of the BigDIVA project’s creators. “And we think we delivered,” he told NC State’s Matt Shipman.
BigDIVA, which stands for Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application, offers a visual interface for navigating scholarly, peer-reviewed humanities content, such as historical documents, images of art and artifacts, and any scholarship associated with those things.
Coded, curated, not clouded by irrelevant results
The infographic displayed by the system is organized by category and color coded to distinguish items requiring permissions or subscriptions to access. For example, if a user is searching from a home computer and doesn’t have access to a specific journal article, the article would be shaded gray. But if the user logged in through a university library that did have access to the journal, the article would be shaded blue. The visual format is designed to let users navigate myriad search results quickly.
The content in curated, so search results are not clouded by irrelevant items that generally crop up in conventional search engines. For example, if a user searches for the 14th century poem Piers Plowman, BigDIVA’s search results would include images of actual manuscripts, transcriptions of those manuscripts, and related scholarly articles. The results would not include Twitter accounts or editions of Piers Plowman that are for sale by online booksellers.
“Our plan is to market BigDIVA as a subscription-based service to libraries and the higher education community,” Stinson told Shipman.
The collaborators then began testing the beta version of BigDIVA with target audiences earlier this year – and are still in the process of fine-tuning the site.
BigDIVA will be formally unveiled Oct. 16 at the Hunt Library on NC State’s Centennial Campus. The event is free and open to the public.
