Dear Colleagues

NCeSS Agenda Setting Workshop
Bridging quantitative and qualitative methods for social sciences using 
text mining techniques
Manchester Conference Centre, UK 28th April 2006
This free workshop aims to bring together researchers from different 
subject areas (computer scientists, computational linguistics, social 
scientists, psychologists, etc) in order to explore how text mining 
techniques can revolutionise quantitative and qualitative research methods 
in social sciences. New technologies from text mining (e.g. information 
extraction, summarisation, question-answering, text categorisation, 
sectioning, topic identification, etc.) which go beyond concordances, 
frequency counts etc can be used for quantitative and qualitative content 
analysis of different data types (e.g. transcripts of interviews, 
questionnaire analysis, archives, chatroom files, weblogs, etc). The 
semantic analysis of new text types, e.g. weblogs is important for 
sociologists and political scientists in inferring social trends. 
Reputation and sentiment analysis collects and identifies people's 
opinions, attitudes and sentiments in text. Text mining techniques also 
aid metadata creation for qualitative data and facilitate their sharing.
Speaker include Prof. Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA; Dr 
Tetsuya Nasukawa, IBM Tokyo Research Lab., Japan and Dr Lee Gillam, 
University of Surrey.
Registration is now open at: http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/

Poster Abstracts still being accepted!
Poster abstracts for the Second International Conference on e-Social 
Science are still being accepted (closing date 27th of March).  
Topics include:
Case studies of e-Social Science research methods and applications 
Enabling new sources and forms of sociological data through e-Social 
Science 
Infrastructure and tools for e-Social Science 
Middleware for data collection, sharing and integration 
Standards for metadata, ontologies, annotation, curation, etc. 
Usability issues in the design of research tools and middleware 
Case studies of (e-)Research and (e-) Social Science research practices 
The benefits and challenges of large scale collaborative research 
Interdisciplinary research and e-Social Science 
International collaborations in e-Social Science 
Socio-technical issues in the development of e-Research and the Grid 
Ethical issues and challenges in the collection, integration, sharing and 
analysis of sociological and other personal data 
Please submit a 250 – 300 word abstract at: 
http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference/submissions/

Best wishes
Gillian Sinclair

Dr Gillian Sinclair
Programme Manager
ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science
University of Manchester
Dover Street Building
Dover Street
Manchester 
M13 9PL
UK
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.ncess.ac.uk
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