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Rutgers Professor’s ContextMiner Named “Best Political Science Software”
September 22, 2010
NEW BRUNSWICK—Assistant Professor Chirag Shah knew that his online data collecting tool, ContextMiner, was useful to researchers of all stripes – from media to law enforcement to academia. But when the American Political Science Association gave its “Best Political Science Software Award” to ContextMiner, Shah was taken aback – he never went through the submission process.
“This is very exciting because this is coming from an association that I’m not a member of, but they found this useful enough to nominate it for this award,” said Shah, who just joined the Department of Library and Information Science at Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information this semester.
ContextMiner is a free, online program that monitors and archives web content based on keywords. It pores through YouTube videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets, and other content and provides its clients with detailed data, including information about the content creators and other websites that link to the items.
The site has served researchers at dozens of universities in the United States and internationally; organizations like the U.S. Navy, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the FBI have relied on ContextMiner. Even search engine giant Google has used the tool.
ContextMiner was initially funded by the Library of Congress, which sought to document the 2008 presidential election – the first such election in which YouTube and other social media played a major role. “They weren’t interested in just the videos; they were interested in the context around those videos – what are people talking about, rating, watching,” Shah said. The tool is also funded by the National Science Foundation.
The data helps clients in building digital repositories of information that they can archive and analyze. Shah developed ContextMiner while conducting his doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill.
The tool is hosted at the School of Communication and Information, and Shah said he would prefer to keep the open-source ContextMiner a free service rather than turn it into a commercial product. That way, it can serve his own graduate students, who would work to maintain and operate ContextMiner while using it as part of their own information science research. “If possible, I would like to get funding for students,” Shah said.
In North Carolina, Shah and his research partners collaborated with a local newspaper and television station to use ContextMiner for information gathering, and he occasionally gets messages from students across the world. “A couple of students from Singapore sent me their thesis and they used ContextMiner to help with their research,” Shah said. “I was really flattered.”
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