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Funding Success in the Information School

Congratulations to Professor Paul Clough, Dr Gialuca Demartini and Dr Farida Vis for their recent funding success in relation to the following projects.

Paul Clough and Gianluca Demartini gained funding for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (studentship) with the National Archives on 'Investigating entity-centric methods for information exploration and discovery in digital archives'.

The aim of this research project is to investigate entity-centric methods for supporting users as they explore and navigate the UK Government Web Archive. This would allow users to explore the archive based on entities such as people, places, locations and events in addition to search and navigation based on the content itself. Forming an entity network structure over the Government Web Archive based on Linked Data would also allow connection with existing resources, such as DBPedia and Freebase. The network structure can also be used to create additional features, such as recommendations and identifying popular entities (“hubs”), to further support exploration. From a technical perspective the work will involve identifying entities, resolving ambiguous entity occurrences, for example the same entity being referred to in different ways, and creating links between related entities. Prototypes will be developed to enable investigation into how entity-centric approaches may help users make sense of large collections, such as the Government Web Archive, and support exploration and discovery.

Farida Vis received funding for a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (IF) for the 'ENGAGE: Encouraging Network Generation’s Accountability and Global Engagement' project.

The successful Fellow is Lin Prøitz, currently a researcher at the IT Research Group, Vestlandsforsking, The Western Norway Research Institute.

The key aim of the ENGAGE project is to address young people’s practices and participation in society via social media. Social media is a valuable knowledge area for current and future democratic processes and participation. Young people are important citizens who will be the future leaders, researchers, workers and thinkers in Europe. Consequently, exploring the perspectives they have on Europe and understanding better how they engage in shaping its future is crucial for the long-term success of the European project. ENGAGE focuses on unravelling, understanding and mitigating new forms of political and civic engagement within the digital visual cultures and social networked societies that young people from Norway and the United Kingdom are a part of.

Farida also received funding from the White Rose ESRC Doctoral Network which offers three studentships, one each at the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds and York.  The studentship in the Information School relates to the Big Data and Food Safety network.

The network brings together world-leading scholars working on different aspects of Big Data from complementary disciplines, including Media and Communication Studies, Geography, Sociology and Social Policy, Politics, and Management in order to develop critical methodological and theoretical innovation applied to Food Safety. The network will work closely with the Food Standards Agency to develop three projects that combine academic research with the emerging Big Data remit within the Agency.

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