Use of Affordable Eye Tracking in News Verification Strategies
June 14, 2017
The Digital Research team are facilitating a collaboration between Schools of Sociology and Social Policy, and Computer Science to explore fake news in social media. Having completed a survey which explored user perceptions of fake news, we are now about to begin a series of studies looking more closely at the ways people assess digital …
Digital Engagement (8): Toolkits for Assessment
May 9, 2017
For members of the public, the main outcome of academic research is not usually the data, but the insight, analysis and commentary that an academic provides. This means that even if the data were made available to a wider audience in an interactive way (as per the previous blog post), it relies heavily on the …
Digital Engagement (7): Toolkits for Data Analysis
May 5, 2017
One key thing that researchers across different disciplines have in common is research data. This can take many different forms, is often stored and structured in databases or spreadsheets, which helps researchers to manipulate, visualize and analyse the data in useful ways. Other researchers might be able to make use of the data for their research, …
Transcription Services: A First Step Toward Safe Use
May 2, 2017
Researchers who carry out interviews or focus groups will typically digitally record the audio for later reference and analysis. This data will then get transcribed by the researchers or via a transcription service for a set fee. When using a service, researchers will transmit the audio files to the provider, who then carries out the transcription and …
Research Data and Software Agreements: Digital Research Case Study 14 2017
The Digital Research Team are here to help researchers make best use of digital technology for their work. An intriguing side-effect of this is the increasing need to effectively govern and manage the risk around the use of digital technologies creating new demands on researchers within the digital context. For example, a researcher who creates …
JISC Workshop on Digital Skills for Researchers
April 26, 2017
The Digital Research Team visited Newcastle yesterday to take part in a workshop run by JISC. The aim was to help explore what role they can play in supporting researchers in attaining the right level of digital skills. There were around 20 people from different institutions, with Research Software Engineers, Librarians, Research Managers and Digital …
Emerging Research Opportunities from Digitised Newspaper Data
April 7, 2017
The Digital Research team are facilitating the digitisation of some paper-based research data in the form of a newspaper article archive. We have hired an administrative assistant who has made a great start at scanning in the thousands of articles that were collated across the last decade. Roughly speaking it is taking about 1 hour to …
Surveying Traditional and Digital Consumption of Fake News
The Digital Research Team are facilitating a collaboration between the Schools of Sociology and Social Policy, and Computer Science. The team, led by Christian Karner and Martin Flintham, are looking to apply sociological research methods to explore fake news in social media. Following a detailed literature review, the team are moving forward with the first stage of …
Introducing Handwriting Technologies
March 30, 2017
The Digital Research Team are currently running an initiative to explore the digitisation of paper-based research data. Having done some ethnographic work myself, I am all too aware of the amount of paper based research data that can be generated, with many full physical note books in a matter of days. We all know the …
Digitising Paper Based Research Data: Digital Research Initiative 1 2017
As a Digital Research Specialist, researchers often say to me: “What do I need technology for?” This comes as no surprise since many types of research do not immediately lend themselves to digital technology. For instance Ethnography, the systematic study of people and cultures, is typically achieved through just using pen and paper. In fact, …