Clare Llewellyn and Laura Cram

The Imagine Europe project explores how people use social media to talk about the UK’s relationship with the EU. Clare Llewellyn and Laura Cram report on a recent data science event in Edinburgh in which the project participated.

LinkedIn Maps Data Visualisation, Luc Legay, CC-BY-SA-2.0

This week the Imagine Europe project took part in the Data Science for Media Summit which was held in Edinburgh and hosted by the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Edinburgh.

The aim of the summit was to encourage members of the media to discuss problems that they have with big data and data analytics. The hope is that, from this information, the Alan Turing Institute can identify appropriate areas for research.

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The Alan Turing Institute

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To start off, Howard Covington, Chair of the Turing Institute, explained the aims of the Institute and gave an overview of the big data landscape.

The day featured a mix of researchers from academia, industrial data scientists and members of the media. The programme included talks by Mike Dewar from the New York Times, Steve Plunkett from Ericsson and Michael Satterthwaite from the BBC.

https://twitter.com/_djcr/status/653948237854953472

https://twitter.com/_djcr/status/653924547771695104

There were panels on data journalism, audience engagement and the value of data, alongside some great networking.

We had a booth next to the Edinburgh School of Informatics Language Technology group on geo-tagging and data analytics. We gave a demo of the beta version of the tools we are using to analyse the EU-related twitter datasets we are collecting. We are looking, amongst other things, at hashtag frequency, sentiment towards the EU and the location of tweets.

For more information, Nicola Osborne provided a great live blog of the event:

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Data Science for Media Summit LiveBlog

Today I am at the ‘Data Science for Media Summit’ hosted by the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Edinburgh and taking place at the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh. This promises to be an event exploring data science opportunities within the media sector and the attendees are already proving to be a diverse mix of media, researchers and others interesting in media collaborations.
NICOLA OSBORNE

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Our project is part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s The UK in a Changing Europe programme. Look out for our regular updates as the project tracks developments in the debate on the UK’s continued membership of the EU and follow us on Twitter @myimageoftheEU.

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Neuropolitics Research Lab – People – Politics and International Relations (PIR)

Neuropolitics research politics experiments using fMRI brain scanning.
WWW.POL.ED.AC.UK

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Laura Cram is Senior Fellow, The UK in a Changing Europe, investigating The European Union in the Public Imagination: Maximising the Impact of Transdisciplinary Insights (ESRC/ES/N003985/1).

This article was originally published on the imagineEurope Storify.

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Clare Llewellyn
University of Edinburgh

Clare Llewellyn is PhD Candidate in Informatics and Research Fellow in the Neuropolitics Research Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on user-generated content on the Internet. Her research interests include social media, big data and text and data analytics.

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Laura Cram
University of Edinburgh

Prof Laura Cram is Professor of European Politics at the University of Edinburgh; Senior Fellow, The UK in a Changing Europe; and Academic Editor of European Futures. Her research areas include European public policy, European identity and the neuropolitics of public policy and identity.

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