You will not catch Steven Claeyssens carrying a smartphone and he will always prefer a paper book to an e-reader. Yet he is the curator of digital collections at the National Library of the Netherlands. I interviewed him about his job, text and data mining (TDM) in the humanities and the role of libraries in the research landscape.
How is a scientific paper structured and how related is it to other papers? These are some of the things that Iana Atanassova of the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comte (Besancon, France) focuses on in her research. She uses text and data mining (TDM) to study full-text scientific articles. Studying these papers can be a challenge, as they are usually in a format that is hard to process.
Marc Bertin is assistant professor at the University of Toulouse uses text and data mining to study scientific papers. Text and data mining can help us move from an information society to a knowledge society, but not without open access to research papers.
When scientists need information about the structure, name or properties of small molecules, they often turn to a high quality database called ChEBI. This database is largely curated manually and this process takes a lot of time. OpenMinTeD is working on a textmining application that can help to speed up the process, while maintaining the quality of the database.
Joris van Eijnatten is professor of cultural history at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He has a fascination for numbers that not many historians have. Last year he was the research fellow for digital humanities at the National Library of The Netherlands, where he applied text and data mining to study the image people have of Europe based on newspapers. I interviewed him about text and data mining in humanities, his work and his personal romance with numbers.
What is the real novelty of a research paper? How do different researchers contribute to innovation? And does this change throughout their career? Shubhanshu Mishra of the University of Illionois uses textmining techniques to study the novelty of biomedical articles.