Cascades, Islands, or Streams? Time, Topic, and Scholarly Activities in Humanities and Social Science Research

Abstract

This project will examine topic lifecycles across heterogeneous corpora, including not only scholarly and scientific literature, but also social networks, blogs, and other materials. While the growth of large-scale datasets has enabled examination within scientific datasets, there is little research that looks across datasets. The team will analyze the importance of various scholarly activities for creating, sustaining, and propelling new knowledge; compare and triangulate the results of topic analysis methods; and develop transparent and accessible tools. This work should identify which scholarly activities are indicative of emerging areas and identify datasets that should no longer be marginalized, but built into understandings and measurements of scholarship.

Papers Published: Tsou A, Thelwall M, Mongeon P, Sugimoto CR (2014) A Community of Curious Souls: An Analysis of Commenting Behavior on TED Talks Videos. PLoS ONE 9(4): e93609. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093609

Principal Investigators

Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Ying Ding, Staša Milojević, Indiana University, Bloomington, NSF
Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton, AHRC/ESRC/JISC
Vincent Larivière, Université de Montréal, SSHRC