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“The basics of what we do here is the application of technology to research where technology wasn’t native,” said Dale Askey, administrative director of the new centre and associate university librarian.

The idea: The output will be easily digested and used by other academics and citizen researchers who can mine the data, find their own uses and seek their own answers from it.

“We are dealing with things beyond text or where texts are no longer things you just read but also process and you apply other data to them that humanists would not have ordinarily picked up,” said Mr. Askey.

A researcher can then analyze data in moments that would have otherwise taken an entire career to process — if ever.

“We see ourselves as a cool, fresh start-up for research involving technological components,” said Sandra Lapointe, the McMaster centre’s academic director, who is also an associate professor of philosophy, one of the most traditional fields in humanities.

“One of our concerns is the diffusion of knowledge and availability of knowledge. Digital scholarship makes it possible for researchers to publish their work where the content is not hostage to costs and fees,” she said.

A few weeks after opening, one researcher is already using a huge commercial database of downloaded songs, obtained from Nokia, and comparing the purchases to changing weather patterns, news events and other data, to learn more about the psychology of music.