XQuery | Clifford B. Anderson

New 'Text Mining' Tech Tools Boon for Vanderbilt Researchers

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.”

Vanderbilt to Host NEH-Supported Institute on Digital Humanities

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars from across the United States and abroad will be at Vanderbilt University June 9-20 to improve their skills in building projects in the digital humanities. The XQuery Summer Institute: Advancing XML-Based Scholarship from Representation to Discovery will be led by Clifford B. Anderson, director for scholarly communications at the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt.

During the two-week session, twelve participants will learn how to build projects in the digital humanities using the programming language XQuery and an open source XML database called eXist. The institute is among the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities supported by the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Our goal is to help digital humanists take the next step in their work,” Anderson said. “We want them to reach the full scholarly potential of encoding documents in machine readable format by teaching them how to query and analyze those texts computationally.”