Addressing the TDM Literature Gap with Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians
Recorded on 11/05/2025
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 448
This fall our friends at ACRL published Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians, a wide-reaching text that details how librarians are using Text and Data Mining (TDM) across disciplines and levels of expertise. This month, we’re joined by two of the book’s editors, Whitney Kramer and Iliana Burgos, for a two-part series to discuss why this book is needed right now. In the series, our guests highlight the growing demand for TDM literacy among researchers and outline what makes TDM partnerships work across campus. Further, they chat about licensing agreements and copyright in relation to TDM, practical case studies in the book, and how TDM literacy might evolve from here.
In this first episode, Whitney and Iliana reveal that they started this project with their coeditor Evan Muzzall in response to a gap in the literature—there was a clear lack of guidance for librarians on how to support researchers using TDM. Next, they share their working definition for Text and Data Mining and why their call for chapter proposals specifically sought out early-career writers. Last, Whitney and Iliana underscore that librarians don’t need to become TDM experts overnight, instead recommending to approach any new technology from a “learning perspective.”
Apply promo code “ACRL20C” through December 1, 2025 for 20 percent off Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians.
About the guests:
Whitney Kramer
Research and Data Librarian, Catherwood Library
Cornell University
Whitney Kramer is the research and data librarian at Catherwood Library at Cornell University. In this role, she supports students and faculty in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the Economics, and Statistics and Data Science departments who work with both structured and unstructured data. Her research interests include data literacy and the usage of text data in social science research. Her work has been published in The Data Literacy Cookbook, Choice, Journal of New Librarianship, and ResearchDataQ. Previously, she was the entrepreneurship and public services librarian at the Roanoke Public Libraries in Roanoke, Virginia, and the business research librarian at Lippincott Library at the University of Pennsylvania.
Iliana Burgos
Emerging Data Practices Librarian, Digital Scholarship Services
Cornell University Library
Iliana Burgos is the emerging data practices librarian at Digital Scholarship Services at Cornell University Library. She supports researchers in exploring digital and computational approaches to humanities scholarship. Burgos specializes in text data management and computational text analysis methods guided by open scholarship principles. A Ronald E. McNair Scholar and American Library Association Spectrum Scholar, her research engages text data and algorithmic literacies, critical platform studies, and community-based data justice movements. She previously worked in community outreach roles as a Carolina Academic Library associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Wilmington Institute Free Library of Delaware.