Getting Started: Text Mining at UC Davis
Text mining--the application of computational analysis to textual corpora--is an increasingly popular avenue of inquiry among humanists and social scientists. It is, however, a more than usually complex research environment as many tools require significant training and the ability to text-mine one or more licensed resources may be constrained by terms in those license agreements.
The UC Davis DataLab offers advanced support for Text Mining through workshops, office hours and consultations. In particular, see the DataLab Services and Research Toolkits pages for details on available resources and support.
Anyone interested in developing expertise in this area is strongly encouraged to reach out to DataLab
Introductory Text Mining Resources
Here are a few self-serve options for text mining and data visualization available through the library that can serve as an introduction to this method.
- ProQuest TDM Studio--Visualization onlyAll UCD affiliates have access to the visualization portion of TDM Studio. It allows researchers to query a limited set of ProQuest databases and to apply a limited set of visualization analyses to a result set up to 10.000 documents.
Included databases are: Dissertations and Theses; and recent decades of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. The earliest news articles are from the 1980 New York Times. - Jstor ConstellateConstellate draws on collections in Jstor and Portico (a related company) as well as several open access collections, including: Chronicling America, Documenting the American South, the South Asian Open Archives and Independent Voices from Reveal Digital.
UCD is not a subscriber, but the free version available to campus users has significant visualization functionality. - Jstor Text AnalyzerThis beta product analyzes a document uploaded by patron and then returns what it believes to be relevant articles in Jstor's database.
Full-Function Text Mining Resources
Listed here are text and data mining resources designed to analyze specific UCD Library licensed databases. Many additional resources are available through the UC Davis DataLab
- Gale Digital Scholar LabThis is an online tool for conducting text analysis and data visualization on material extracted from those Gale Primary Source Collections licensed by UC Davis. Users can also upload their own corpora to be cleaned and analyzed using the Lab's toolkit.
- HathiTrust Research CenterWith the HTRC tools you can conduct computational analysis on material from the HathiTrust Digital Library at scale. Tools are available for both beginner and advanced TDM researchers.
Instructions on how UC Davis affiliates register to use the HTRC are available here, HTRC FAQ - ProQuest TDM Studio--WorkbenchProQuest’s Text Data Mining (TDM) Studio is a feature rich platform for finding relationships, patterns, and connections within and between text data sets.
UC Davis has access to one shared TDM Studio workspace managed by DataLab which can be used for only one project at a time. UC Davis research teams can apply to Datalab for access for a fixed term to access the platform and may have to wait for it to become available.
To express interest in using the UC Davis workspace on Text Data Mining (TDM) Studio, please email datalab@ucdavis.edu.
TDM Studio provides access to current and historical ProQuest content licensed by UC Davis. Researchers also have the option to upload their own data into the platform. TDM Studio provides a number of built in tools, and also allows scripting in R and Python for analyses and visualizations.
