Integrated Social History Environment for Research (ISHER)-Digging into Social Unrest

综合社会历史研究环境（ISHER）——深入挖掘社会动荡

• 批准号: 1209359
• 负责人: Dan Roth
• 金额: $ 12.5万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-01-01 至 2014-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1209359&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Integrated; Social; History; Environment; Research

Social historians and researchers in social sciences rely to a great extent on text data for their research. Currently these data sources are increasingly available in electronic form. The Digging into Social Unrest project aims to develop software tools for automated analysis of news archives. The project will help researchers discover information and obtain answers to questions that now take large, if not unrealistic amounts of human effort to answer. The aim is to develop text mining tools which will provide social historians and scientists the means to detect, associate, and visualize the events and the underlying trends, people, and organizations related to social unrest. This work is based on the notion that conditions leading to social unrest can be identified and extracted from news archives, which may include reports about events of varying degrees of organization and violence --ranging from social movement meetings, to protests, strikes, demonstrations, and riots. Careful study of these sources can be used to extract indicators analysts can use to predict societal instability trends and events. The Digging into Social Unrest project will develop a text-mining based search system that improves entity and event extraction by building upon tools and services previously developed by members of this team. The tool, called ISHER (for Integrated Social History Environment for Research) will be a fully open source framework and will be designed with the intent of working on any digital text repository. Specifically, the tool will allow rich semantic metadata extraction for collection indexing, clustering, and classification. The primary broader impact of this project is that it will develop a tool that can be used by a wide array of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. In addition, the research will add to the body of knowledge on social unrest and is highly likely to spur research on comparable data archives by researchers in other fields.This grant was made as part of the Digging Into Data Challenge, an international competition designed to foster research collaboration across countries and to encourage innovative approaches to analyzing large data sets in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to the US research team, this project includes researchers from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

社会历史学家和社会科学研究人员在很大程度上依赖于文本数据进行研究。目前，这些数据来源越来越多地以电子形式提供。社会动荡挖掘项目旨在开发用于自动分析新闻档案的软件工具。该项目将帮助研究人员发现信息，并获得问题的答案，这些问题现在需要花费大量的人力来回答，如果不是不切实际的话。其目的是开发文本挖掘工具，为社会历史学家和科学家提供检测、关联和可视化与社会动荡有关的事件和潜在趋势、人和组织的手段。这项工作基于这样一个概念，即可以从新闻档案中识别和提取导致社会动荡的条件，其中可能包括关于不同程度的组织和暴力事件的报道--从社会运动会议到抗议、罢工、示威和骚乱。对这些来源的仔细研究可以用来提取分析师可以用来预测社会不稳定趋势和事件的指标。挖掘社会动荡项目将开发一个基于文本挖掘的搜索系统，通过建立该小组成员以前开发的工具和服务来改进实体和事件提取。这个名为Isher(用于研究的综合社会历史环境)的工具将是一个完全开源的框架，其设计意图是在任何数字文本存储库上工作。具体地说，该工具将允许为集合索引、集群和分类提取丰富的语义元数据。该项目的主要更广泛的影响是，它将开发一种可供社会科学和人文科学的广泛学科使用的工具。此外，这项研究将增加关于社会动荡的知识体系，并极有可能推动其他领域的研究人员对可比数据档案的研究。这项拨款是作为挖掘数据挑战的一部分提供的，这是一项旨在促进跨国研究合作并鼓励创新方法来分析社会科学和人文科学中的大型数据集的国际比赛。除了美国的研究团队外，该项目还包括来自荷兰和英国的研究人员。