Supporting the language and literature research community through e-infrastructures

Sinnott, R.O., Sarwar, M., Kalyanaraman, A., Anderson, J.G., Alexander, M. and Greene, J. (2009) Supporting the language and literature research community through e-infrastructures. In: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Oxford, UK, 7-9 Dec 2009,

Abstract

Humanities scholars are producing a growing amount of digital data. This is especially so in the language and literature domain where editions, text archives, corpora, dictionaries, sound and video collections are increasingly abundant. Despite this high level of production, ongoing use and development of these resources raises numerous issues. At present, there is no interoperability between online resources or repositories of language and literature information. Instead researchers typically conduct their research through direct access to individual resources. This results in an internet-hopping form of research which is non-scalable, time consuming and ultimately frustrating to the language and literature research community. Scholars are thus discouraged from making full and imaginative use of resources. The recently funded JISC project, Enhancing Repositories for Language and Literature Researchers (ENROLLER – www.enroller.org.uk) has been funded to address this issue. This paper describes the background to the ENROLLER project and outlines how it is combining a wide variety of data and computational resources, and collaborative tools to support a step change in the way in which language and literature researchers undertake their research. In the full paper, we will also describe early proof of concepts of the infrastructure including how exploitation of high performance computing facilities such as ScotGrid (www.scotgrid.ac.uk) and the UK e-Science National Grid Service (www.ngs.ac.uk) are facilitating advanced search capabilities.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Sinnott, Professor Richard
• Authors: Sinnott, R.O., Sarwar, M., Kalyanaraman, A., Anderson, J.G., Alexander, M., and Greene, J.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• College/School: University Services > IT Services > Computing Service