A new survey explores the problems researchers in various sectors experiences in attempting to use text and datamining (TDM), and you can help.
TDM is a basic feature of daily digital life, for good and ill. It is what enables search; it drives targeted advertising; it feeds predictive policing; and increasingly for scholars it is a crucial tool to track networked behaviors and identify patterns relevant to their subject disciplines. Those disciplines are as wide-ranging as medicine, political science, engineering, legal studies and communication; for Internet studies, it is routine.
But unless you work for a company that generates the data you want to study (and Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon hire armies of them), it can be tricky to get your hands on the material. Copyright and contracts get in the way; so do terms of service. And library/archive policies. And, of course, lack of knowledge and misinformation.
Our survey, offered in English, Portuguese and Spanish, will give us cross-cultural information on what problems researchers encounter, and what they do when they have those problems. Kindly take the survey, and share it widely with your networks!
The survey:
