Kindles, card catalogs, and the future of libraries: A collaborative digital humanities project

Librarianship is a profession that often inspires commentary both from practitioners within the profession and the public who use libraries. For librarians keeping up with the field, the literature is often engaged with predicting the effects of culture, policy or technology on libraries, sometimes with a great deal of hyperbole. For this article, two librarians and a digital humanities researcher formed a research team to determine if the digital humanities technique of distant reading through topic modeling would reveal interesting patterns in a Digital humanities project corpus of library-themed literature engaged in predicting the future and/or demise of libraries.