Last year at THATCamp there was an informal presentation about humanities software development and MassMine. At that point we did have functional code written that could systematically collect data from Twitter, but MassMine was more concept than fully developed project. A year later, the MassMine project has received start-up funding from the NEH, has completed almost a full year of on-going development and testing through UF’s supercomputer cluster, has been tested in humanities and social science classrooms at two universities, and is being used for on-going data collection in numerous research projects.

This presentation will quickly show some of the newest developments for MassMine, and discuss the use of MassMine through Research Computing in the humanities classroom at UF.

Possible topics for discussion after short presentation:

• How to use MassMine or get involved with the project
• Humanities software development
• Text mining
• Data visualization
• Grant writing

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