[Air-L] LINIS data service for academics

[Olessia Koltsova]

*Dear all,*



Our Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS) is launching a collaborative
service aimed at media & communication scholars from social science and
humanities who may have great research ideas but cannot download or process
the data they need.



As a group of academics, we do not aim at becoming a for-profit data
factory. Instead, we seek to offer the academic community such a division
of labor that would help scholars get their research supported by data and
ultimately published, and would simultaneously give us a chance to share
and fully exploit our data-processing resources and skills that otherwise
stay underused.



*What are the challenges of big data collection & processing that we can
help with?*

·       reformulate your research interest as a research task that can make
use of the existing data “out there”;

·       reformulate this task in terms understandable by software
developers;

·       connect to a developer who understands what a genuine academic
research is;

·       download the data and store them in a database with a right
structure;

·       make sure it has been done legally and ethically;

·       formulate what further manipulations with the data the developer
should do to answer the final research question;

·       check the quality of the developer’s work;

·       provide related method advice.

This may be a challenge even for those social scientists who do have
experience with coding for small-scale data. LINIS has the experience in
organizing full-cycle big data research including the listed procedures.



*Right now we will support two major formats of resources & skills sharing:*

·       Data download and processing only: LINIS provides data for your
research design without participating in publications and with LINIS
expenses fully covered;

·       Collaborative work on both research design and data collection:
LINIS shares expenses and participates in joint publications.

More formats that would help bring together researchers with complementary
skills may be supported in future if the pilot stage goes well.



We will support only legal and ethical data collection and processing for
academic research.



We invite research groups, but above all individual researchers with modest
research budgets to contact us via  linis-spb at hse.ru <linis at hse.ru>  .


Olessia Koltsova
Director, Laboratory for Internet Studies
National Research University Higher School of Economics
room 216, 55/2 Sedova St.,
190008, St.Petersburg, Russia
Phone: +7 (812) 560-00-55
www.linis.hse.ru
E-mail: ekoltsova at hse.ru
http://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/202747