Elizabeth Lorang, research assistant professor and digital humanities projects librarian in the University Libraries has teamed up with Leen-Kiat Soh, associate professor of computer science and engineering to develop software that will perform image-processing functions to mine data from digital formats.
Millions of poems were submitted and printed in American newspapers from the late 18th century to the early 20th centuries.
Lorang and Soh plan to figure out how to locate these poems among the eight million digitized newspaper pages. The analyzation of these poems could change the history of American literature.
“This is a big data problem,” Soh said. “What could be done manually, there is now a possibility to do it with computers.”
Soh and Lorang will fund their project to build the software with a $60,000 start-up grant received from the National Endowment for the Humanities. They will be working on this project with Spencer Kulwicki and Maanas Varma Datla, two sophomore CSE students.
For more information please refer to the UNL Today article: http://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/unltoday/article/project-mines-8-million-news-pages-for-poetry/