JISC

The ASSIST project is the result of the community call stage of the ASSERT project which provided funding opportunities to investigate the benefits of text mining in 2 case studies within the social science disciplines. This includes a review of the requirements gathering stage in order to advise future projects in this area and the development of high profile exemplars demonstrating how text mining solutions can solve, in part at least, major challenges facing e-Researchers across all domains.

Two projects have been funded, a brief description of each is provided below. As the projects develop we will expand this site to include more information and provide links to the developing exemplars.

Case Study 1

UK Educational Evidence Portal
This project is with the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (specifically its user involvement team) to work with NaCTeM to develop and evaluate an innovative search engine — using text mining — for a portal of education evidence, relevant to education practitioners and policy-makers. This project will be a high profile exemplar of the utility of text mining in the social sciences, with application beyond the single case described here.

Case Study 2

Frame Analysis of Media
This project is with the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) in collaboration with the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) to work with NaCTeM to develop and evaluate an innovative tool for analysing news texts to investigate how they are framed to shape the perceptions or opinions of the information’s recipient. An outcome of the project will be an evaluation of the applicability of text mining tools, initially developed for quantitative data analysis, to improve qualitative analysis.