Resumen de Text Mining at an Institution with Limited Financial Resources

Drew E. VandeCreek

• The digital humanities are now coming to the attention of a growing number of scholars and librarians, including many at medium-sized and small institutions that lack significant financial resources. Should these individuals seek to explore text mining, one of the digital humanities core activities, they are likely to confront the fact that their library cannot afford the typical expensive database products that contain large volumes of materials suitable for analysis. In this opinion piece, I suggest that vendors would benefit from increasing their customer base by offering potential users the opportunity to purchase discrete portions of data sets individually. This approach may prove practicable for libraries able to muster relatively modest sums for the purchase of single items. It also may represent a new source of revenue for vendors, or at least an opportunity to build trust and goodwill in the digital humanities community.