In this round table, librarians and scholars who have participated in both programs will share their approaches to computing on cultural heritage. Meghan Ferriter will represent the Library of Congress Labs, explaining the ways that the library is encouraging new computational approaches to discovering and interpreting digitized collections. Benjamin Lee will share his Newspaper Navigator, a new interface for visual collections for use by historians and other researchers. Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold will share their work on the Access & Discovery of Documentary Images, augmenting documentary photographic collections through computer vision algorithms. Lincoln Mullen and Jessica Mack will share their work identifying trends in biblical quotations across collections, as well as in identifying multilingual documents.

These brief presentations will set the stage for a discussion about approaches to computational historical research and its significance for historians more generally, moderated by Benjamin Schmidt. Among the questions to be discussed are these: How can historians approach large-scale collections computationally? What is the relationship between computational methods and conventional historical research? How can libraries and researchers partner together, both to encourage researchers’ aims and to augment libraries’ collections? What are the implications of the partnership between librarians and computational researchers for more conventional historians who use digital collections (i.e., very nearly all historians).