Funding success
MeRC has been awarded funding by the JISC under its emerging tools programme to develop a Twitter analysis workbench. In this new project we will be working closely with the COSMOS team at Cardiff University.
Contact Rob Procter (rob.procter@manchester.ac.uk) or go to the project website for more details.
Analysing Social Media
MeRC is exploring new methods and tools to analyse data produced by users of social media platforms such as Twitter. Our approach combines computer-based tools to explore and discover structure in large volumes of data with conventional methods for media analysis. A recent project is a collaboration with the Guardian newspaper on a study of the August 2011 riots. Some results of our work were published last year (online 7 Dec 2011).
Contact Rob Procter (rob.procter@manchester.ac.uk) or go to the project website for more details.
RIN Study on Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers published
The Research Information Network (RIN) this Summer published a study on 'Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers' which was conducted by MeRC and ISSTI at University of Edinburgh.
The report and briefing sheet are available on the RIN website.
The study looks at the extent of adoption of different web 2.0 tools in different subject fields and disciplines, and the different types of researchers who are using them. The project homepage can be found here on the MeRC pages for more details.
NGS Communities launched
The NGS has recently launched Communities which is designed to help NGS users find other users in similar research areas etc. The aim of the service is to foster interaction between NGS users, enable collaboration and to encourage a sense of community between users of the NGS services.
Finding NGS users is easy and Community members can search the NGS user database using key words such as software names, research topics etc. All user application cases are searchable and it is also possible to browse lists of users by research areas and institutions.
Communities is only accessible to NGS users through the user account page and therefore is not publicly available. All active NGS users are members of Communities unless they have decided to opt out.
We hope that NGS users find Communities useful and feedback on the service is welcome. More information on Communities can be found at http://www.ngs.ac.uk/Communities
JISC launches 'Research 3.0' campaign
Findings from projects in which MeRC has been a collaborator are featured in this new initiative from JISC to raise awareness among the UK research community of innovations in research methods, tools and infrastructure.
Find out more here about the goals of Research 3.0 and read the accompanying Times Higher supplement in which Rob Procter discusses some of the barriers to the adoption of research innovations.
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