We will provide a short introduction to the software project called MassMine–an open source software, developed by academic/humanities researchers, for use within the academy. The software has been used to data mine Twitter and this data is being analyzed as the basis for a publication about trends, media ecology, and the concept of cybernetic “attention.” Our short presentation will explain how the software project resulted from limitations in currently available tools for conducting academic research on social media. The goal is for introduction to lead to engaging and innovative dialogue about the prospects for humanities software development, the ongoing task of understanding how/why data science/mining may present useful methods for research in the humanities, and/or how software development and data science may be integral to the research of “writing” (any form of inscription or multi-modal composition) as it occurs within an ever-changing and restructuring media ecology.

–Nicholas M. Van Horn will be co-presenting/collaborating remotely for this session

www.massmine.com

I will be presenting on the HathiTrust Research Center and how to use its beta research portal.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is dedicated to providing computational access to published works in the public domain and, in the future, on limited terms to works in-copyright in the HathiTrust Digital Library (hathitrust.org). The HTRC is a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.

This session will provide an introduction to using the HTRC portal for basic text mining investigations (htrc2.pti.indiana.edu/HTRC-UI-Portal2/). Attendees will learn how to build a workset from the HTRC corpus, apply the textual analysis tools provided in the HTRC portal, and generate visualizations such as word clouds and statistical frequencies.