New 'Text Mining' Tech Tools Boon for Vanderbilt Researchers

Vanderbilt University scholars can now take advantage of new technological tools to extract and analyze huge amounts of text, with the potential for increased research opportunities across disciplines. Owen faculty members Catherine Lee, Michael Stuart and Richard Willis have been working with Vanderbilt Libraries to conduct a semantic analysis of historical earnings conference calls of publicly traded firms, using a new application program interface to the LexisNexis Academic database.

Integral to the Owen research project and others is the campus’s growing XQuery expertise. “As the demand for digital scholarship support rises across campus, libraries are building on their deep knowledge of databases with new programming skills, like XQuery,” says Clifford Anderson, director for scholarly communications at the library. “In particular, XQuery is a good match for the digital humanities; digital humanists frequently look for patterns among large quantities of loosely structured documents.” Read more …