€139,000 ERC funding for 'Impact Tracer'
Tracking the impact of research and reach of messages – be it a press release, blog entry or newspaper commentary – across the world could become easier in the future thanks to funding for a King’s research project from the European Research Council (ERC).
The ‘Impact Tracer’ project, led by Dr Christoph Meyer, Head of the Department of European & International Studies, aims to develop a web application which allows analysis of different kinds of digitally available texts, whether ancient scriptures or news articles. The software could ultimately track, for example, how much influence a particular press release has on subsequent blog entries, forum posts or social media, not just in terms of being cited directly but also more subtle ways of being used. The tool aims to offer a much more cost-effective method and efficient means of analysing trends within these texts than individuals undertaking the monitoring and evaluation process themselves.
The application could be used by advertising companies, political parties and NGOs to monitor the impact of their public pronouncements and corporate messages over time and will be of special interest to those looking to evaluate the success of a particular campaign, for example, a drive to stop people smoking.
Dr Meyer is working with the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s to establish contacts with international research groups working on text-mining, the practice of using software to identify trends and patterns from multiple written texts.
The project’s €139,000 funding is the result of a competition for ‘Proof of Concept’ ideas by the ERC. Introduced last year, it allows researchers who already hold ERC grants to bridge the final gap between research and the earliest stages of innovation.
The funding will be used to test the prototype web application and produce a business plan to attract commercial players.
Dr Meyer said: ‘We are very excited about this opportunity to develop a tool with a wide-range of applications in academic and commercial research.
‘In working closely with Digital Humanities we hope to improve techniques used to make large data sets more accessible and relevant to social science studies.’