MassMine Training Session, Nov. 13, 2014, and Online

The UF Libraries are hosting an upcoming training session on MassMine, developed by Nicholas Van Horn and Aaron Beveridge,  with the training by Aaron Beveridge, PhD Student at UF in English. More information on the session is below, and will soon be updated with the online session link.
We’re looking forward to a big crowd for this training in-person and online, and to soon be scheduling many additional trainings on MassMine for specific research areas, topics, and more!

MassMine Training Workshop: Tools for Humanists for Big & Small Data Research—and for Learning to “Do” Data with Research Practices, Concepts, & Communities at UF
Presenter/Trainer: Aaron Beveridge
Training: November 13, 2014, 12-1pm, in Library West 211, and via Adobe Connect (link to be added)
Humanities researchers currently lack sufficient access to social media and web data as data that can be downloaded/saved, processed, and analyzed, as well as lacking tools for data mining and tools for processing data for analysis. MassMine is open source software and was created to address these concerns specifically by humanists for the needs of humanists by providing a set of easy to use tools for creating social media and web data archives, querying and mining the archives, and revealing the processes and technologies for enabling generation of new methods and new questions. The MassMine open source data mining software enables researchers to collect their own social media and web data archives and supports data mining, thus providing free access to “big data” for academic inquiry. MassMine further supports researchers in creating and defining methods and measures for analyzing cultural and localized trends, and developing humanities research questions and data mining practices. MassMine and tools like it are critical for enabling new approaches to small and big data for humanists by creating access to data with tools for data mining, processing, and analysis.
This meet-up will take the form of a hands-on training session for using MassMine. The session will include an introduction to MassMine and how it was created in response to a humanities research question, how to use MassMine on UF Research Computing servers, and a larger discussion of developing research questions, project scope, goals for data research, methodological concerns including data acquisition strategies for statistical needs and intellectual goals, data privacy and IRBs, and open discussion of humanities concerns and considerations with data research.
The seminar is open to all UF faculty, staff, and graduate students. This seminar is organized by the Digital Humanities Working Group and Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, and is made possible through the generous support the UF Research Computing for hosting and supporting the MassMine software for researchers.
Suggested Background Readings

• MassMine: www.massmine.org
• Franco Moretti. “GRAPHS, MAPS, TREES: Abstract Models for Literary History.” New Left Review, http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/09w259/Moretti_graphs.pdf
• Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz. “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation.” DH Curation Guide, http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/
• Research Projects for Humanities Data Mining with MassMine: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00025511
• Additional resources: Using MassMine on UF’s Research Computing Cloud Server, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00025501/

This training is a DH Workshop by the UF DH Library Group and a UF Digital Humanities Working Group Meet-Up.