Machine Learning, Libraries, and Cross-Disciplinary Research: Possibilities and Provocations

This collection of essays is the unexpected culmination of a 2018–2020 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame. The plan called for a survey and a series of workshops hosted across the country to explore, originally, “the national need for library based topic modeling tools in support of cross-disciplinary discovery systems.” As the project developed, however, it became apparent that the scope of re- search should expand beyond topic modeling and that the scope of output might expand beyond a white paper. The end of the 2010s, we found, was swelling with library-centered investigations of broader machine learning applications across the disciplines, and our workshops demonstrated such a compelling mixture of perspectives on this development that we felt an edited collection of essays from our participants would be an essential witness to the moment in history.