[Air-L] "Big Data" Tools

[Wifak Houij Gueddana]

Hi Everyone,


It is great to see so many people interested in computational analytics and
'big data' tools. I have done some research on the subject when I was doing
my PhD and it seems that people from different countries use different
tools to do similar things.

I am here talking about network-visualisation tools in particular, I have
identified three major communities around three world-leading visualisation
tools for academics. In Europe, the DMI
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDatabase>, Netherlands (mentioned
earlier in this thread by Nick) works closely with MediaLab
<http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/> (France) and they star product is
Gephi <http://gephi.github.io/>. Anatoliy Gruzd in Canada (first Dalhousie
Uni., then  Ryerson University) has launched Netlytic
<https://netlytic.org/> through the Social Media Lab
<http://socialmedialab.ca/author/gruzd/>. I love netlytic; it is a web app
and combines visualisation and content analysis. In America, NodeXL
<http://nodexl.codeplex.com/> has become the per-default tool to create
visualisations from tweeter, facebook and email/newgroups. It targets
mainly social science (SS) and digital humanities (DH) scholars with little
IT skills. It is a Microsoft Excel Add-in, and as you may have guessed
Microsoft Research (USA) was involved in its design early on; but its main
spokesperson today is MarcSmith <http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/>,
Social Media Research Foundation <http://www.smrfoundation.org>, California


I am currently involved in a research proposal aiming to adapt a wide array
of computational features (text mining - visualisation and dynamic
analysis) to netnographic and qualitative traditions. My goal is to design
a sofwtare solution that acts like an exploratory platform for social
sciences' scholars enabling them to study online platforms, participation
and communities more generally.

Do you know people/research centers who are working on a similar project,
or/and can be interested in leading/sponsoring the design of this tool?

Do you know other tools or algorithms that were tested and are massively
used by scholars from SS/DH today?

Matt, I am interested in your list, if you are happy to share it :)

Best,

Wifak Gueddana
Research Officer
Information Systems and Innovation Group
Department of Management
Lodnon School of Economics and Political Science, London
UK


On 12 April 2015 at 08:50, Robert Ackland <robert.ackland at anu.edu.au> wrote:

> Hi Matthew (and all) - a while back I announced on this list a 5-day short
> course "Big Data Analysis for Social Scientists" being run at the
> University of Queensland, Brisbane, 29 June - 3 July.  The course is being
> run by myself and Tim Graham (University of Queensland).  We are developing
> R code to help non-R experts get started with big data collection and
> analysis (essentially: wrappers around a number of excellent R libraries
> written by other people), and this code will be released open source
> (hopefully as an R library, via CRAN).  We are developing additional
> courseware (notes, exercises).  The following page describes more about the
> course and our code (not yet released):
>
> http://voson.anu.edu.au/big-data-analysis
>
> regards,
> Rob
>
>
>
> On 10/04/15 13:08, Matthew Weber wrote:
>
>> AIR'ers:
>>
>> I'm working on compiling a rough list of tools and training modules that
>> are useful for working with large-scale datasets ("Big Data") and training.
>> Essentially, I'm trying to build *something* that I can point newbies /
>> graduate students / to when they say "I want to do Big Data". I've got a
>> rough list of coursera / edX / blog modules, but would welcome suggestions.
>> I'm happy to share back the results.
>>
>> (I did try to check the AIR archive, but was unable to access).
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Matt
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Matthew S. Weber
>> Assistant Professor
>> School of Communication and Information
>> Rutgers University
>>
>> (ph): 848-932-8718
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
>
> Dr Robert Ackland
> Associate Professor and Deputy Director (Education), Australian
> Demographic and Social Research Institute <http://adsri.anu.edu.au>
> Leader, Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab <
> http://voson.anu.edu.au>
> Australian National University
>
> My book:
> Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the
> Digital Age <http://www.amazon.com/Web-Social-Science-Concepts-
> Scientists/dp/1849204810> (SAGE Publications)
>
>
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-- 
Dr Wifak Gueddana
Research Associate
Information Systems and Innovation Group-Department of Management
London School of Economics
Tel: +44 7545 997955