Excavating Texts—Data Sources, Mining, and Ownership

What can you actually do with the library's databases? This session maps the ecosystem of textual data available to researchers: databases with text and data mining rights, repositories and APIs, and the open web. We'll examine what TDM agreements permit, explore sources like HathiTrust and Constellate, and take a critical look at web scraping — how it works, when it's appropriate, and why it's contested terrain. Underneath it all: what does it mean to treat text as data, and who controls it?