The Library’s annual fellowship in digital scholarship started in 2020.
The National Librarian’s Research Fellow in Digital Scholarship 2021-22
Dr Rosa Filgueira is Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences at Heriot Watt University. Her research work focuses on investigating new advanced data-driven frameworks, libraries and architectures, which aim to reduce the effort required to develop data-driven applications at scale that can be run in heterogeneous environments, while ensuring the reproducibility of results and hiding the underlying hardware, software, data complexities.
Project overview
frances: An AI-toolbox to provide insight into Data Foundry collections
This project will explore new ways to unlock the full value of Data Foundry collections by building a new AI toolbox called frances*, which will enable users to accelerate the process of discovering insights from digital collections without being distracted by the technology and middleware details.
frances will comprise a set of complex text-mining queries (ready to use) to run automatically and at scale. These queries will employ the best-in-class Machine Learning/NLP algorithms, such as topic mining, sentiment analysis or text summarization, along with visualization graphs for the results. The idea behind this is that historians (and other communities) can extract complex knowledge from digital collections in a fast and transparent manner without having to be an expert data scientist.
The large-scale text mining complexity will be automatically handled in the background by frances. To do this, the project will create a new web user interface to interact with frances. With a visual, step-by-step, guided process, users will be able to:
-select the appropriate Data Foundry collection(s);
-select the analysis to be run (via text mining queries) and its configuration;
-submit the analysis to be performed to the backend system; visualise results automatically (text and graphics);
-export and download results for further exploration.
frances will use Encyclopaedia Britannica as the core dataset and generate a practical guide for running analyses, and how to work with this (and/or any other) Data Foundry digital collection.
*Frances Wright (September 6, 1795 – December 13, 1852), was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, utopian socialist, abolitionist, social reformer, and Epicurean philosopher
Related links
Find our more about the 2020-21 Fellow and Fellowship project: The National Librarian’s Research Fellowship in Digital Scholarship 2020-21