U. of Florida’s Smathers Libraries Awarded NEH Grant for MassMine: Collecting and Archiving Big Data for Social Media Humanities Researchers
From the U. of Florida:
University of Florida researchers have spearheaded a collaborative project which has been awarded $60,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for “MassMine: Collecting and Archiving Big Data for Social Media Humanities Researchers.” The project 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.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a substantial start up grant to the University of Florida for MassMine, a project of the Trace Innovation Initiative in the University of Florida (UF) Department of English in partnership with the George A. Smathers Libraries and UF’s Research Computing. MassMine is open source software developed for the needs of humanities research by providing a set of easy to use tools for creating social media data archives, querying and mining the archives, and 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 sink holes circulate through social media sites like Twitter. MassMine is being developed in response to a lack of sufficient access to social media data, tools for data mining, and tools for processing data for analysis for researchers in the humanities.
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Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Funding, Libraries, News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.