Library Guides: HathiTrust: Introduction for text & data mining: Getting started with the HathiTrust Research Center

Getting started with the HTRC

An overwhelming majority of the HTRC services require an account to log in and interact with the tools.

HTRC Analytics main page
Register for an account by choosing "Sign up" via the link at the top of the page.
Anyone possessing an email address from a nonprofit institution of higher education is allowed to register, including those whose institutions are not HathiTrust members. In most circumstances it is advisable to create an account, even if you end up not using it very much.

Additional Resources:

HTRC Wiki and Documentation
login required
HTRC User Getting Started FAQ
no login required

Only one major feature of HTRC does not require an account and that is the HathiTrust+Bookworm, which allows users visualize and analyze word usage trends in the 4.8 million public domain works in the HathiTrust Digital Library. This operates much like the Google Books Ngram Viewer does, but is specific to the HathiTrust Digital Library (of which Google Books is a participant)

HathiTrust+Bookworm
Provides access to the texts in which the words appear, without requiring a login.
HathiTrust Bookworm Guide
From the University of Illinois

I'm logged in. Now what?

On the Hathi Trust Digital Library, you can build "collections" - items around a particular theme, often between a specified period of time and/or tied to a particular location. These "collections" of items transfer into Hathi Trust's Research Center as "worksets", where you can analyze these groups of text with a specific purpose using a variety of algorithmic approaches.

Worksets have two primary functions:

Organizational

Gather material of interest in one place
Search/metadata criteria to "slice and dice" results into a usable workset (e.g. a subset of a larger workset/collections)

Algorithmic

Delimit the scope of the analysis to a certain feature or element
Execute an analysis on your workset and observe

Learn how to create a workset in the HTRC documentation: https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/x/cIFnAQ. (You will need a HathiTrust login to access their wiki.)