Dalhousie University is a post-secondary educational institution located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, known for producing Rhodes Scholars (having averaged a new one every 27 months over its 194-year history). Another interesting fact that the school is known for is the Social Media Lab in which faculty and students of the “Dal” School of Information Management have been developing a number of online text analytics tools.
Data Analytics for Information Tracking
The Lab is directed by Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd whose “ongoing research initiatives explores how social media and other Web 2.0 technologies are changing the ways people disseminate knowledge and information, and how these changes are impacting the social, economic and political norms and structures of our modern society.”
Focused Text Mining Application
Two of the Lab’s products are AcademiaMap.com and rDmap. AcademiaMap.com is used to analyze social network communications from Twitter anywhere across the internet. This tool allows users to filter out “noise” and concentrate on more relevant (and market-usable) topics of conversation. rDmap (Research Discovery Map) is a web-application that presents graphic visualizations of the interaction between individuals of a given organization and how their collective communication topics relate to each other.
Free Text Analytics Software
But the tool that likely has the greatest interest to readers of this blog is the one called Netlytic, “a free web-based system for automated text analysis and discovery of social networks, collected solely from digital footprints such as online forums, micro-blog messages, blog comments and chat logs.” Netlytic sanitizes captured free text then detects and processes themes within the text and builds a starburst-type, taffy-pull graphic map so users can observe relationships by identified nodes and related sub-nodes.
Predictive Data Modeling for Twitter
According to the explanation found on the Social Media Lab website, “Netlytic has successfully been used to analyze a wide variety of online communities and networks including: learning communities, communities of bloggers and blog readers, communities emerging on the i-Neighbors website, a scholarly community on Twitter and most recently a study of TheOneRing.net, a popular online fan website dedicated to discussions of Tolkien’s (text) and Peter Jackson’s (film) versions of The Lord of the Rings.”
To try out Netlytic for free, go to the Social Media Lab Demo page by clicking here.
