Today I’ll be giving a short talk/demo on a shiny-based webapp I’ve been working on to perform basic text analyses. You can see a live demo of the app here: https://wrathematics.shinyapps.io/tags

The presentation details are as follows:

Title: The XSEDE Text Analytics Gateway - Basic Text Analysis Tools Without the Programming

Abstract: The humanities and social sciences have historically been dominated by qualitative methods, often performed without the aid of computers. But as questions become more complicated and data collections grow, researchers have increasingly found themselves turning to quantitative methods and computational resources. But there is some resistance, often driven by a “technological familiarity gap”. Indeed, researchers in these fields often lack a programming background, and have historically had little access to training. Worse, there is generally no institutional reward for developing technical skills. The XSEDE Text Analytics Gateway (TAG) seeks to offer a basic set of tools for the 99% of researchers in these fields working in text analytics, powered by the big iron available only through XSEDE. In this talk, we will introduce the gateway, its history and goals, its current state and progress, as well as future work.

Michael L. Black is an Assistant Professor of English at UMass Lowell. His research addresses the cultural history of personal computing, big data, and new media. He recently served as the Associate Director for the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of Illinois. Drew Schmidt is a first year PhD student in analytics at the University of Tennessee. His primary research interests are dimension reduction, high performance computing, text mining, and the R language.

Recordings and slides will be made available at: https://www.xsede.org/gateways-symposium