Development of an open-source toolkit and training materials that would allow humanities researchers to collect and analyze large-scale, publicly available data drawn from social media sites.
The MassMine project team representing participants from the Department of English, George A. Smathers Libraries (Libraries), and Research Computing at the University of Florida (UF) requests $60,000 to finish the version 1.0 release, develop a robust training program, and promote the MassMine open source software. MassMine enables researchers to collect their own social media data archives and supports data mining, thus providing free access to big data for academic inquiry. MassMine further supports researchers in creating and defining methods and measures for analyzing cultural and localized trends, and developing humanities research questions and data mining practices. The primary aims of this project are to: 1) refine the MassMine tools to support collection, acquisition, and use of available social media and web data; and, 2) develop a training program and corresponding online resources for supporting the broad use of MassMine by humanities researchers, regardless of experience.