Cascades, islands, or streams? Time, topic, and scholarly activities in humanities and social science research

这项研究的目标是创建工具，以允许分析跨不同语料库的主题生命周期。虽然大规模数据集的增长使得在科学数据集中进行检查成为可能，但缺乏着眼于数据集的研究--检查不同的科学活动如何使科学发现成为可能或推动科学发现。这个项目将考察四个领域的主题的发展：科学史、社会网络分析、认知科学和数字人文。考察这些领域的主题的生命周期，应该提供对社会科学和人文科学中学术如何跨流派发展的洞察力。将使用三角方法(单词分析、主题建模、突发检测和生存分析)来确保最高水平的有效性。这个项目在数据集的组合上是创新的；这项研究将结合来自正式来源(论文、会议记录、期刊文章和拨款提案)和非正式沟通渠道(列表服务器、博客和推特)的数据，以提供更全面的科学沟通视角。多年来，我们对学术领域的知识，以及随后对创新、生产力和影响的理解，在很大程度上是由单一来源的数据提供信息的。然而，反映独特学术活动领域的多样化数据集的增长改变了研究格局，并为更准确地理解科学的本质提供了机会。这项工作的结果将对政策制定者产生影响，因为他们正在寻求确定新兴研究领域。它还将提供一个指标，表明某些交流渠道对于识别新兴知识领域的重要性--识别哪些学术活动最能代表新兴领域，从而确定不应再被边缘化的数据集，而是构建在我们对学术的理解和衡量中。这项提议的主要更广泛影响之一是通过使用印第安纳大学的学生使者计划发展新的研究人员，该计划将允许学生与PI一起工作，参加会议，并有一个休养生息的机会，他们将分享自己的研究成果，并参与同行指导。此外，该项目应该有助于向学者和政策制定者提供关于新兴研究领域以及传播和共享新知识的方法的信息。这笔赠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的国际比赛，旨在鼓励以创新的方法分析社会科学和人文科学中的大型数据集。除了美国的研究团队外，该项目还包括来自加拿大和英国的研究人员。

The objective of this study is to create tools to allow for analysis of topic lifecycles across heterogeneous corpora. While the growth of large-scale datasets has enabled examination within scientific datasets, there is a lack of research that looks across datasets--examining how different scientific activities enable or propel scientific discovery. This project will examine the development of topics in four domains: history of science, social network analysis, cognitive science, and digital humanities. Examination of the lifecycle of topics in these domains should provide insights into how scholarship evolves across genres in the social sciences and humanities. Triangulation of the methods (word analysis, topic modeling, burst detection, and survival analysis) will be used to ensure the highest level of validity. This project is innovative in its combination of datasets; this research will combine data from formal sources (dissertations, conference proceedings, journal articles, and grant proposals) and informal communication channels (listservs, blogs, and twitter) in order to provide a more holistic lens on scientific communication. For years, our knowledge of the scholarly landscape, and subsequently, our understanding of innovation, productivity, and impact, has been largely informed by data from a single source. However, the growth of diverse datasets that reflect unique areas of scholarly activity have altered the research landscape and provide an opportunity to create more accurate understandings of the nature of science. The results of this work will have implications for policy makers, as they seek to identify emergent areas of research. It will also provide an indicator of the importance of certain communication channels for identifying emerging areas of knowledge--identifying which scholarly activities are most indicative of emerging areas and, thereby, identifying datasets that should no longer be marginalized, but built into our understandings and measurements of scholarship.One of the chief broader impacts of this proposal is the development of new researchers through the use of Indiana University's student emissary program, which will allow students to work alongside the PIs, travel to meetings, and have a retreat in which they will share their own research and engage in peer mentoring. Further, the project should help inform both scholars and policy makers about emergent areas of research and for ways of disseminating and sharing new knowledge.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 Canada and the United Kingdom.