Faculty, researchers and students in the Socio-technical Data Analytics Group design, develop, and evaluate new technologies in order to better understand the dynamic interplay between information, people and information systems.

We are a highly interactive group with complementary areas of interest that span a range of genres from the humanities and everyday life, to journalism and scientific literature. Our expertise includes analysis methods in information retrieval, data and text mining, knowledge discovery, and collaboration. In addition to text analysis, we explore multimedia such as games and music, and new kinds of data such as twitter feeds.

As of April 2011, the funded research projects within the group include:

• Towards Evidence-Based Discovery (NSF). Understand both human and automated methods to synthesize evidence from text (ebd.lis.illinois.edu, NSF Link). PI:Blake
• Defining and Solving Key Challenges in Microblog Search (Google). Explore both theoretical models and prototype search systems to address core problems in microblog search (Webpage, Announcement). PI:Efron
• Expand SEASR Services (Mellon). Explore text-mining as a tool for understanding the humanities (Announcement). Co-PI: Unsworth
• Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (NEH). Create a framework for analyzing musical audio data and use the framework to process songs from a range of online sources (www.music-ir.org). PI:Downie
• Collaborative Research: The Impact of Scientific Funding (NSF). Link MEDLINE articles and U.S. patents using state-of-the-art name disambiguation algorithms (Announcement, NSF Link). PI:Torvik
• Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 (IMLS). Improve the capacity of libraries, museums, and archives to preserve computer games, video games, and interactive fiction (Announcement). PI:McDonough
• The Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (McCormick Foundation). Develop the next generation of investigative journalists who can make the best use of the new digital tools (Announcement). Coordinator:Houston
• Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques (Google). Convert a query in contemporary English to English terms used in text from Medieval times to the present (Webpage, Announcement). PI:Efron
• Text Mining in Environmental Literature (Environmental Change Institute). Develop text mining methods that enable resolve contradictory and redundant evidence from text (Announcement). PI:Blake

Other related activities, people and active projects include:

• Twidale engages in a range of synergistic research areas including collaborative information systems, ubiquitous computing, and learning systems (see his WebPage for publications)
• CU-CitizenAccess.org. An online center where citizens, journalists, students and educators can share news, and data about socio-economic issues in Champaign County and can explore the data using visualization, data and text mining (WebPage) PI: Houston

Update requests to this page, and questions about the SoDA group can be directed to:

Dr. Catherine Blake, clblake@illinois.edu Associate Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
(with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Medical Information Science)
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign