The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In September 2011 I returned to work after a year on maternity leave. Many things needed sorting out, not least my digital presence at my home institution, which had switched to a content management system that seamlessly linked to University College London’s open-access repository, “Discovery.” The idea was we should upload open-access versions of all our previously published research, and link to it from our home pages, to aid in dissemination.

Textal: A Text Analysis Smartphone App for Digital Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

This poster introduces Textal, a text analysis application for iOS, and text analysis service infrastructure, which is currently in development at UCLDH and UCLCASA and will be freely available beginning Summer 2013. This poster will present findings evaluating the development, launch, and reception of the app, indicating how smartphone technology can increase the potential for public engagement within the Digital Humanities.

Textal (soon to be launched at www.textal.org, currently on twitter at @textal) will be a freely available smartphone application which allows users to create, share, and explore word clouds of a document, website, or tweet stream. Those in visualization and Digital Humanities have tended to sneer at the popular use of word clouds, given we are used to applying robust text analysis tools (such as http://voyant-tools.org/).¹ However, Textal turns word clouds into an intuitive, visually-oriented interface: once a Textal of a chosen text is generated, users can click on words to access underlying statistics, such as frequency and collocates, and so we believe that the pinch, stretch, and click potential in smartphones, along with our judicious design, can fix the elements of word cloud visualization which are currently held to be problematic and act as a bridge between those who have never encountered text analysis techniques, and the more detailed approaches undertaken by researchers in Digital Humanities. All Textal visualizations, including word-clouds, graphs, charts, and word lists, can be shared via social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the resulting interface word clouds will also be available online. Textal is powered by server-side processing of linguistic data (users can submit any text material they want, by URL, or copy, or paste). The resulting sever architecture will also serve as an API for those wishing to carry out on-the-fly generation of text analysis statistics, which can be used in conjunction with other web services.

Mterras on Journal of Digital Humanities

The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment

Textal: A Text Analysis Smartphone App for Digital Humanities

Poster

Abstract