Mining the Native American Authored Works in HathiTrust for Insights

Native Americans represent a historically under-resourced textual community. While there has been an ever-increasing number of Native authors creating works since the 1960s, no corpus of Native-authored works exists from which to draw insights about this particular community, and give them the recognition equal to other similar communities of practice (e.g. History of Black Writing1). In collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and with the support of a Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Re-use and Dissemination grant (SCWAReD2), we have created a preliminary database of Native-authored works, which allows us to use text mining techniques to reveal novel characteristics of this community, such as their identity, worldview, representation, and modes of expression. Text mining also offers a new approach to looking at the ways in which Native authors express themselves and how they may differ from other authors. For example, there is a common assertion that Native peoples forefront the natural world or communitarian relationships more so than non-Native authors (e.g. Schweninger, 1993; Weaver, 1997). Additionally, we are interested in the rhetorical characteristics of the Native American Studies academic genre as illustrated by corpora of Native Studies journals, and how these trends define the evolution of the discipline over time.

Dataset
# of titles searched
# of titles found in HTDL
Coverage

IPL
2013
900
44.71%

NAL
122
37
30.33%

Linguistics dissertations
34
0
0%

Bibliography

Schweninger, L. (1993). Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers.
Melus,
18(2), 47-60.