The Wilde Trials Web App enables both large-scale, multi-directional comparison of thousands of news reports, as well as close detailed analysis of individual reports. To populate the database, Colligan’s team drew from international newspaper digitization projects, as well as OCR transcription. The software has now examined more than 1,200 news reports covering the scandal, and continues to grow. Not only does it identify all of the commonalities and variations in the vast textbase, but also when and where in the world they occurred.

“When you find those papers that have unique coverage, it's quite a discovery. It's different and independent,” she explains. “So that's revealing new information about the event as well as a new perspective.”

The team’s work currently stands at the forefront of data-driven research methods on the 19th- century press. But beyond the trials, the application has the potential to save countless other scholars from bleary-eyed afternoons in the library stacks. Colligan sees the software as a compelling tool for other researchers and professionals, like journalists, who gather text and ask questions about plagiarism, text reuse, viral text and censorship.

In the summer of 2016, Colligan co-launched SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) with English Professor Dr. Michelle Levy, Web and Data Services Developer Michael Joyce, and Digital Scholarship Librarian Rebecca Dowson. In partnership with SFU Library, the Lab is a research incubator and source of training and mentorship for scholars across SFU. The DHIL team, which includes graduate research assistants, works to support SFU faculty and graduate students with digital scholarship through consultation, training, mentoring, research software development and technical support.

“We see it as laying the groundwork for different types of research that use data-intensive approaches, and that work with cultural data in particular,” Colligan says. “We're working with researchers, faculty and graduate students to mentor and support them in the work that they're doing, and some of these projects can be experimental and exploratory.”

While Colligan’s project with the Wilde Trials Web App is highly data-intensive, relying on computational methods, other projects at the DHIL are focused on what she calls “archive building.” These researchers are leveraging the online environment to preserve and share archival information in interactive ways.