Lab Co-Director to participate in Digging Into Data

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Richard Marciano, Lab Co-Founder and Co-Director, will participate in the Digging Into Data Challenge, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. His team is one of fourteen selected in this second round of funding.

His project is titled, “Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry” with Principal Investigators: Ray R. Larson, University of California, Berkeley and Richard Marciano, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, IMLS; Paul B. Watry, University of Liverpool, AHRC/ESRC/JISC. Additional participating institutions: Internet Archive, JSTOR.

Fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States were named the winners of the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and librarians from leading universities worldwide. Sixty-seven international teams in total competed in the challenge as well as the many libraries, archives, and data repositories that made materials available to the researchers. The competition was very keen and, in the end, fourteen teams were awarded grants after an international peer-review process.

The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences — ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records — what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship.

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