Illinois State University: ISU geology professor awarded $1.7 million NSF grant. “Illinois State Associate Professor of Geology Catherine O’Reilly is serving as principal investigator for a $1.7 million National Science Foundation grant to fund Project EDDIE, a series of classroom modules for undergraduate biology, geology, and environmental science students…. Project EDDIE (Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration) is designed to help students and faculty work with large data sets. In addition, the project aims to improve students’ skills in quantitative reasoning, understanding of the nature of environmental science, and scientific discourse.”
data analysis
Stanford University: Stanford scholars are helping journalists do investigative journalism through data
Stanford University: Stanford scholars are helping journalists do investigative journalism through data. “A team of Stanford University scholars are launching a data-driven initiative to help journalists find stories at a lower cost, to support local newsrooms explore public interest issues and fight against misinformation.”
PR Newswire: Google, Facebook, and Twitter Release Data on Political Ads (More or Less) (PRESS RELEASE)
PR Newswire: Google, Facebook, and Twitter Release Data on Political Ads (More or Less) (PRESS RELEASE). “Using cutting-edge machine learning and data scraping tools, computer scientists at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering today released the first database and analysis of political advertising based on more than 884,000 ads identified by Google, Twitter, and Facebook. The team launched their user-friendly Online Political Ads Transparency Project in July with data from Facebook, which was the first company to provide it. But the researchers were forced to switch techniques when Facebook blocked their data collection two weeks later. Today’s report is the first to include not only Facebook (including Instagram), but data newly shared by Twitter and Google.”
Library of Congress: Data Mining Memes in the Digital Culture Web Archive
Library of Congress: Data Mining Memes in the Digital Culture Web Archive. “As part of an effort to analyze how comprehensive our web crawls are, we ended up deriving data that we realized may be potentially useful for users of the collection. In working on methods to track the number of various kinds of files in individual web archives, Chase Dooley, a Digital Collections Management Specialist on the Web Archiving Team here in the Digital Content Management section, was able to generate lists of the individual GIFs and Memes in these web archives. For these kinds of web archives, researchers often want to explore data about these resources more than they want to replay what the site looked like at a given point in time.”
HathiTrust Research Center Extends Non-Consumptive Research Tools to Copyrighted Materials: Expanding Research through Fair Use (HathiTrust)
HathiTrust: HathiTrust Research Center Extends Non-Consumptive Research Tools to Copyrighted Materials: Expanding Research through Fair Use. “Since 2011, HTRC has been developing services and tools to allow researchers to employ text and data mining methodologies using the HathiTrust collection. To date, this service has been available only on the portion of the collection that is out of copyright. With the development of a landmark HathiTrust policy and an updated release of HTRC Analytics, HTRC now provides access to the text of the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus for non-consumptive research, such as data mining and computational analysis, including items protected by copyright.” I am probably parading my ignorance here but I didn’t know what “non-consumptive” means. It sounds like research that doesn’t have tuberculosis. HathiTrust has a page to lay it all out.
Engadget: A date with my Tinder data
Engadget: A date with my Tinder data. “I was on Tinder for almost four years. I’m no longer single, but Tinder and its parent company, Match, still have data on me. I didn’t delete my profile — I didn’t even think to — so using GDPR to request what information they had on me was more exciting, or at least more personal, than doing so for other tech companies and services. On the dating apps, I swear I’d tried to keep it classy. I didn’t succeed.”
NewsWise: Researchers win $3 million NSF grant to train teams of data detectives with ecological expertise
NewsWise: Researchers win $3 million NSF grant to train teams of data detectives with ecological expertise. “When it comes to how climate change is impacting ecosystems, there’s no shortage of data out there. But finding enough people who know both ecology and how to interpret that data can be a different story. A team at Northern Arizona University is wagering that more skilled interpreters can help make sense of this data deluge, and their idea just won a five-year, nearly $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to train graduate students in tackling big ecological questions through informatics, collaboration and better communication.”
