As part of this work, we felt that it was important for us to talk to those engaged in text mining work both in the UK and internationally. This survey is intended to elicit a little information about the practices and challenges associated with text mining.

Important points to bear in mind:

• Your input will be treated anonymously and your personal details will not be stored unless you ask us to do otherwise.
• If you feel that you have more to say than the limited scope of this survey, then why not contact us directly? We would love to hear from you – and there are still opportunities to contribute to relevant chapters of the book.
• If you think you know someone who should be involved, we’d be very grateful if you could pass this on to them.

We expect to publish the results in open-access form once the survey is complete.

Working with text: Tools, techniques and approaches for text mining

Text mining tools and technologies have a long history in the repository world, where they have been applied successfully for a variety of purposes. These vary from pragmatic aims such as enabling document search and browse facilities, linking related documents, identifying copies or facilitating the deposit process, to support tools for academic research. The latter category includes supporting research on the basis of a large body of documents, facilitating access to and reuse of existing work, and connecting the formal academic world with areas such as the traditional and social media. Research areas as diverse as biology, chemistry, sociology and criminology have seen effective use made of text mining technologies.

However, the uptake and hence the impact of these tools has been uneven. Several obstacles to development and deployment are frequently cited, including the maturity, complexity, and in some instances cost of software packages, as well as scarcity of relevant technical skills. Text mining methods and tools can be fragile and complex, requiring significant set-up time and effort. Projects making use of text mining may also suffer from legal obstacles, such as copyright and intellectual property considerations. The benefit to be gained from deployment of text-mining tools in areas such as institutional repositories or as a research tool in its own right may be difficult to predict without a costly pilot project.

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished chapters describing research in relevant areas and/or reviewing relevant literature and trends.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Discipline-specific research involving text-mining: bioinformatics, chemistry, the social sciences, etc.

• Techniques in text mining: sentiment analysis/subjectivity analysis, opinion mining, affect analysis, metaphor analysis, etc.

• Legal and ethical aspects of text mining/analysis.

• Current developments in text mining.

• Metadata extraction from document text, including formal and informal metadata: ontology extraction, document indexing, document classification, and evaluation of metadata quality.

• Text mining for document categorization or summarization.

• Text mining over the social web: community detection, timelines, etc.

• Evaluation of text mining tools, open-source or commercial: case studies and findings.

• Procurement and evaluation of text mining tools.

Submission

Chapters of 4,500-9,000 words in length should be prepared in either Word or LaTeX. As chapters will be reformatted during the publication process, authors are advised to concentrate on content rather than formatting. Please include any images/graphics as separate files; images/graphics should be 300dpi or better and designed to be readable when printed in greyscale.

Files should be submitted by email to Emma Tonkin <e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk>. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

Important Dates/Deadlines

24-Dec-2012 Title/Abstract submission for preliminary approval

4 -Jan-2013 Author notification

11-Feb-2013 Manuscript submission deadline

24-Feb-2013 Author notification

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published in 2013 by Chandos, a leading international publisher with specialisms in Library Management, Information Management, Social Media and the Web; it will be distributed in the United States via the American Library Association. It will be available both as a printed publication and as a freely available Open Access resource, increasing the visibility of the final work. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit http://www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/ChandosInfo.aspx.

Please note: although this book is to be made available as an Open Access resource, authors/contributors will not be expected to pay a fee.