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

社会历史学家和社会科学研究者在很大程度上依赖文本资料进行研究。目前，这些数据来源越来越多地以电子形式提供。 挖掘社会动荡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，现在需要大量的，如果不是不切实际的人类努力来回答。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相关的事件和潜在趋势、人物和组织的手段。这项工作的基础是，可以从新闻档案中识别和提取导致社会动荡的条件，这些档案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人员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，通过建立在该团队成员以前开发的工具和服务之上，改进实体和事件提取。该工具名为ISHER（用于研究的综合社会历史环境），将是一个完全开源的框架，并将设计用于任何数字文本库。具体来说，该工具将允许为集合索引、聚类和分类提取丰富的语义元数据。该项目的主要影响是，它将开发一种可供社会科学和人文学科广泛使用的工具。此外，该研究还将丰富社会动荡的知识体系，并极有可能刺激其他领域的研究人员对可比数据档案的研究。该研究是“挖掘数据挑战赛”的一部分，该国际竞赛旨在促进各国之间的研究合作，并鼓励采用创新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，该项目还包括来自荷兰和英国的研究人员。

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.