Text Mining Tools for Your Research

Are you a researcher working on text-based projects? Ever tried to make sense of all those social media posts, or analyse a long and complex literary text? Wrangling large volumes of text can be a challenge. We get advice from a data steward on ways to improve the process.

Text mining (also known as text data mining or text analytics) is a broad name for a number of processes and practices that gather and examine large collections of written resources to discover new information or answer a specific research question. There are a range of different tools to help you get started and work with data-driven techniques, software packages, and programming tools including; Voyant Tools, Orange Text Mining, Text Mining with R, and Textblob: Python Library.

Where to get help

If text mining is something you’re considering in your research, there are a couple of places within the University that can help:

• Digital Studio. The Digital Studio provides a range of services and infrastructure to support University researchers, professionals, and selected industry experts and students working on digital projects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS).
• Social and Cultural Informatics Platform (SCIP). The SCIP team work as a part of the Faculty of Arts Digital Studio and work closely with Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) and their research support staff. SCIP partners with the Digital Studio and MGSE to support research, raising awareness, digital research practice, and training and workshops.
• Research Computing Services (RCS). RCS offers specialised computing services to researchers including infrastructure such as the Melbourne Research Cloud and free digital skills training. Upcoming training in Python, R and many other tools can be found on their eventbrite.

Republished excerpt from Thing 15 from 23 Research Things blog by Kim Doyle.

Related Research Things

Browse the full program of blog posts at 23 Research Things to learn about other digital research tools or topics, and their value to your research practice. Authored by other researchers, technologists, data scientists, and librarians, here some related features that may interest you:

• APIs For Use In Research – The Nuts And Bolts (Thing 14)
• Data Management (Thing 21)
• File Management 101 (Thing 22)

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Image: xresch from Pixabay