Enabling Complex Analysis of Large-Scale Digital Collections: Humanities Research, High Performance Computing, and transforming access to British Library Digital Collections.

How best can humanities researchers access and analyse large-scale digital datasets available from institutions in the cultural and heritage sector? What barriers remain in place for those from the humanities wishing to use high performance computing to provide insights into historical datasets? This paper describes a pilot project that worked in collaboration with non-computationally trained humanities researchers to identify and overcome barriers to complex analysis of large-scale digital collections using institutional university frameworks that routinely support the processing of large-scale data sets for research purposes in the sciences. The project brought together humanities researchers, research software engineers, and information professionals from the British Library Digital Scholarship Department 1, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) 2, UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL CASA) 3, and UCL Research IT Services (UCL RITS) 4 to analyse an open-licensed, large-scale dataset from the British Library. While useful research results were generated, undertaking this project clarified the technical and procedural barriers that exist when humanities researchers attempt to utilize computational research infrastructures in the pursuit of their own research questions.