Work Package 9 - Inventory of tools, training and dissemination
© Gerd Altmann
Work Package 9 - Inventory of tools, training and dissemination
WP9 aims to address how the infrastructure can meet the increasing demand for text analysis tools and training resources among the social science community interested in using political texts. There are a number of challenges faced by this community of scholars:
a) the level of entry skills is high with computing expertise required;
b) the tools (e.g. dictionaries, classifiers) because they cross disciplinary boundaries with different archiving practices are scattered across the Internet;
c) the tools and resources are not updated;
d) their publication and distribution is mostly diffused through word-of-mouth or specialized communities such as #rstats on social media.
Thus, for the non-specialist researcher the task of accessing and appropriately utilizing the tools and resources is challenging. Furthermore, for the specialist, the lack of a platform of resources impedes the further development of skills and may lead to duplication of efforts. For both the non-specialist and specialist, this severely impedes the exploitation of tools and methods that can advance scientific knowledge gained from the widespread amount of political text available today. WP9 will play an important role in integrating the tools and resources of WP2-5 into a single platform to promote and integrate political texts into social science research.