Year in Ideas: University’s digital scholarship centre using open access to make research more useful

...Academics here seek to overturn the paradigm of the lone humanities researcher toiling over a single text or grappling with an arcane concept in solitude. The new centre in Hamilton, and others like it being created around North America, looks to make new research faster, more thorough, more insightful and then, make it more useful — by pushing collaboration and open access. This, in a discipline previously slow to embrace the value of the machine in pursuing human understanding.

“The basics of what we do here is the application of technology to research where technology wasn’t native,” said Dale Askey, administrative director of the new centre and associate university librarian. The idea: The output will be easily digested and used by other academics and citizen researchers who can mine the data, find their own uses and seek their own answers from it...

A few weeks after opening, one researcher is already using a huge commercial database of downloaded songs, obtained from Nokia, and comparing the purchases to changing weather patterns, news events and other data, to learn more about the psychology of music.Another scholar looks to digitize and study Sanskrit fragments, comparing them electronically with known texts and other data for information on origin, meaning and significance. Researchers around the world in the same field can collaborate and share...