Collaborative Digital Research: Case Study of Text Mining a Corpus of Academic Journals

Abstract

More faculty are making the foray into digital scholarship as its tools offer novel and efficient approaches to answering research questions. However, faculty seeking to incorporate digital methods into their research may not have the necessary technical skills. Increasingly, libraries are adding digital scholarship support to the research support offered to faculty. In this article, we document the collaboration between a team of librarians and researchers to leverage each group’s unique skills to analyse and better understand the breadth and specific usage of social class and socioeconomic status terminology used in American Counselling Association (ACA) journal articles over a 17-year span. The work process and outcomes of this project are explained to offer an example of how such collaborative digital scholarship projects can be implemented.

Keywords:

• Collaboration
• library staff development
• researchers
• roles
• university libraries