Former UF student and Fact Finder Megan Taylor tipped me off to this intriguing new opportunity that combines scholarly and applied research techniques on never-been-available datasets–both domestic and international.
Now, before your eyes glaze over with that “oh no, not a scholarly post” scorn, hear me out.
The Digging into Data Challenge is a competitive grant opportunity where researchers are invited to develop, test and showcase ideas employing some of the massive datasets available in the Internet Age. In effect, they’re willing to pay you to come up with an innovative way to mine data.
From my vantage point, the more innovative, the better. And as further enticement, the agencies are offering access to data collections that generally have had no public access, such as university libraries, the Great War Primary Documents Archive, and, my personal favorite, the Wayback Machine.
The goals of the initiative are
* to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis;
* to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis;
* to promote international collaboration; and
* to work with data repositories that hold large digital collections to ensure efficient access to these materials for research.
The “they” sponsoring the competition are: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada. The only major requirement hiccup is thatresearchers from at least two countries must be involved. But that seems doable.
Now, to be fair, I don’t think this opportunity is something that my current fact finders should be thinking about. This is a pretty tall order for even the most advanced researcher. However, it’s certainly something to strive for, if computer-assisted reporting, data mining and research is what gets the blood pumping.