Kindles, Card Catalogs, and the Future of Libraries: A Collaborative Digital Humanities Project.
Published in Digital Library Perspectives, 2018
Recommended citation: Neatrour, A., Callaway, E., Cummings, R. (2018). "Kindles, Card Catalogs, and the Future of Libraries: A Collaborative Digital Humanities Project." Digital Library Perspectives. Vol. 34 Issue: 3, pp.162-187, https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-02-2018-0004 https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-02-2018-0004
Librarianship is a profession that often inspires commentary both from practitioners within the profession and the public who use libraries. For librarians keeping up with the field, the literature is often engaged with predicting the effects of culture, policy or technology on libraries, sometimes with a great deal of hyperbole. For this article, two librarians and a digital humanities researcher formed a research team to determine if the digital humanities technique of distant reading through topic modeling would reveal interesting patterns in a corpus of library-themed literature engaged in predicting the future and/or demise of libraries.