National Endowment for the Humanities digs deep to provide UF with funds for data mining

Published: March 25 2015

Category:InsideUF, Awards & Honors

University of Florida’s department of English, George A. Smathers Libraries and Research Computing have been awarded $60,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant. 

The project, “MassMine: Collecting and Archiving Big Data for Social Media Humanities Researchers,” will support development of an open-source toolkit and training materials that would allow humanities researchers to collect and analyze large-scale, publicly available data drawn from social media sites.

MassMine was developed to provide a set of easy-to-use tools for creating, querying and mining social media data archives, revealing the processes and technologies for enabling generation of new methods and new questions. For example, researchers are using MassMine to track the ways in which news about sinkholes circulate through social media sites like Twitter.

According to project director Sid Dobrin, a professor in UF’s department of English, “Cutting-edge English departments, like that at UF, are opening doors to new research opportunities in writing, literary and media studies. The MassMine tool and the NEH grant are really just the beginning of what can come next.”  

Joining Dobrin in spearheading the project are co-directors Laurie Taylor, UF Digital Scholarship Librarian and Matt Gitzendanner, UF Biological Data Scientist and Research Computing Training Coordinator; Aaron Beveridge, UF department of English Ph.D. student; and Nicholas Van Horn, Ohio State University Ph.D. recipient in Cognitive Psychology. All share the award; the application itself was developed by Beveridge and Van Horn.

MassMine is a project within a larger technology initiative from the UF department of English. It is a central component of the TRACE Innovation Initiative, which is also currently developing applications for augmented reality criticisms, a digital game lab, new approaches to 3-D printing research, a video-based idea sharing clearinghouse, comics-based visual interpretations of academic subjects, as well as a peer- reviewed journal. The first issue of the TRACE Journal, which publishes October, 2015 will address the intersections between animal studies and media studies.

Credits

Contact: Sid Dobrin, (352) 294-2868, sdobrin@ufl.edu

Category:InsideUF, Awards & Honors