Type of session : Play

Title: Why is social media hard to analyse?

Name of session facilitator: Diana Maynard

Approximate duration: 1-2 hours

Skill level: beginner

Proposal: 

Tools for analysing tweets and other kinds of social media are everywhere these days, allowing us to understand what kinds of opinions are being expressed and who is talking about what. However, the reality might not be what you think! Most tools are actually pretty rubbish at “understanding” language, and especially the kinds of language used on social media. What happens when you run these analysers over sarcasm, irony, slang, mixed languages, and so on? In this session you can play with some of the GATE tools on social media datasets of different types. We’ll look together at what kind of problems might occur and discuss how these could be resolved. Most likely, we’ll spend our time laughing at funny examples of AI gone wrong.

Prerequisite: No experience required. Ideally, bring a laptop with GATE installed. gate.ac.uk/download

Type of session: Play

Title: A simple tutorial using Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped in Google Fusion tables.

Name of session facilitator(s): Nora

Approximate duration: 1-2 hr

Skill level: All

Proposal:

I can walk through a short exercise we did for colleagues at British Library as part of our staff Digital Scholarship Training Programme showing how to use Open Refine to prepare messy historical data to be mapped. The dataset relates to our Canadian Photographs Collection. We’ll use OpenRefine to extract location names referenced in these image captions, and then Google Fusion Tables to find latitude/longitude and map the results. Participants are more than welcome to recommend/suggest/try other mapping tools with the data provided at their own pace as well and report back to the group!

Dataset: Picturing Canada Messy Data

Prerequisite: A laptop with OpenRefine installed. A Google account. A print out of Preparing your Data to be MappedRevised and a saved copy of GoogleSheetsGeocodeScript to cut and paste into Google Sheets.

Type of session : Play

Title: Exploring large annotated datasets for interesting information

Name of session facilitator: Diana Maynard

Approximate duration: 1 hour

Skill level: beginner

Proposal: 

Come and play with MIMIR, our tools for semantic search and visualisation of annotated data. Ask complex queries over huge amounts of data. For example: which newspapers talked most positively about Europe before the UK referendum? Were regional issues talked about more than national ones by those who wanted to leave? Which male actors born in France have talked about gay marriage in the BBC news? In this session we will use MIMIR to explore several annotated datasets and see what we can find out. We  might issue some challenges for finding the most interesting facts about a topic, or to answer certain questions the fastest.

Prerequisite: no experience of anything required. Bring laptop connected to the Internet!

Slides and sample queries for MIMIR: https://gate.ac.uk/tutorials/THATcamp2018.html

Type of session : Teach/Play

Title: Introduction to GATE for text analysis

Name of session facilitator: Diana Maynard

Approximate duration: 2 hours

Skill level: all

Proposal: 

This session will demonstrate the basics of text analysis tasks such as named entity recognition and sentiment analysis with the open source GATE tools. Participants will be able to use the toolkit to try simple tasks as we go along, such as using some of the existing applications and tools for different languages, and try annotating their own texts. There are dozens of different tools and plugins to try out. Adventurous users can even try building their own simple applications, tinkering with existing ones, or comparing different tools for the same task and evaluating and visualising the results. Demonstration and discussion of the successes and failures will be encouraged!

Prerequisite: no experience of anything required. Bring laptop with GATE installed (gate.ac.uk/download)

Materials for download: slides and hands-on material (corpora etc) gate.ac.uk/tutorials/THATcamp2018.html

Type of session : PLAY

Title : What can you do with this data ??

Name of session facilitator(s) : Geraldine + ?

Approximate duration : 2h

Skill level : all

Proposal

One corpus of open data (Text ? CSV ?), five teams.

Each uses open source software (limited choice or free ?) to work on the data set and try to achieve results.

Each team presents these to the rest of the group at the end of the session.

Suggestions for the corpus to use or the tasks to complete ??

Prerequisite : Laptop with internet connection