New Online Course: Introduction to Text and Data Mining

Does your work involve supporting researchers who are interested in Text and Data Mining (TDM)?  Do you have an interest in the topic, but no coding or computer skills? Then this course may be interesting to you: OpenMinTeD and the University of Cambridge developed a free online course on text and data mining for ‘non-tech people’.

Text and Data Mining (TDM) is the process of extracting high quality of information from text or data to answer unknown questions. Even though the concept is lately often used, there is an uncertainty as to what TDM can do, how it can be performed and how can Research Support Administrative Staff with non technical skills can assist researchers interested in TDM.  

In an effort to address the mentioned questions, we have put together a course on TDM addressed to those whose job role is to support researchers. A whole section that contains readings on the role of the research support staff from four different libraries is provided. These can be used as the basis of understanding further TDM and help professionals not only to become familiar with the TDM concepts, but also to be able to explore further readings relating to TDM.

This course also touches lightly on legal challenges related to TDM, but focuses mostly on the technical components. We offer two hands-on sections. The first one focuses on how use the  OpenMinTeD infrastructure, access its components and register new ones, while the second demonstrates with practical exercises and text mining activities using data from the CORE, a global aggregator of open access full text scientific content.  

More specifically, the course contains six sections:

  1. Introduction to Text Mining
  2. Do you speak TDM? : Understanding the key concepts and areas of TDM  
  3. Text and Data Mining and Licensing
  4. What Research Support Staff can do for Text and Data Mining
  5. Time to Text Mine: Practical Activities
  6. Glossaries on Text and Data Mining

The estimated time for completing the course is six hours.

This course was created as part of the EU-funded “Opening Infrastructure for Text and Data Mining – OpenMinTeD” project, in collaboration with the Office of Scholarly Communication Cambridge University Library, UK.

Start your Text and Data Mining experience now. Access the course here.