The seeds of the Concepts Analytics Lab were sown when funding was secured in 2017 to conduct a proof-of-concept pilot study entitled Dementia, diaries, and digital technologies. This, like the subsequent iterations of the project to date, have used data from the Mass Observation Project (MOP) in order to inform our understanding of various subjects such as aging, health, waste and energy consumption. MOP is a unique national life writing project about everyday life in Britain, capturing the experiences, thoughts, and opinions of people. Please see datasets for more information about the Mass Observation Project and our involvement with them.
In Spring 2021 we were awarded HEIF funding to work collaboratively with a non-academic stakeholder Africa New Energies (ANE) and an academic stakeholder (Mass Observation Project, The Keep) to carry out the project on “Post-COVID visualisation tool to analyse socio-economic and demographic data in the UK” to support health, social and economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and its wider impacts. Concept Analytics Lab and ANE worked in this stage of the project to develop prototype tools for the visualisation of sociodemographic conceptual data and an API to extract this information from the source corpus.
In 2022, we secured further HEIF funding for the ‘Development of API and visualisation tools to discover post-Covid-19 changes in energy consumption in UK households”. We continued to collaborate with ANE on the project, who have matched funds to help them find changes in consumer’s energy use and waste/recycling habits in the UK. Concept Analytics Lab are using this opportunity to implement a new layer of expanded functionality to the API and visualisation tools.
Concept Analytics Lab was commissioned by Prof Paul Kingston, Principal Investigator UKPRP/MRC: Preventing Disease using Trade Agreements (PETRA) to analyse linguistic data for that PETRA project using tools developed in the HEIF 2021-funded project that Concept Analytics Lab expanded with the technical team of ANE as a part of the HEIF 2021 and HEIF2022 funding.
Within the PETRA project we sought to gain insight about people’s perceptions and attitudes towards trade directives, the priorities in relation to trade deals and any thoughts and fears in relation to trade deals, particularly in light of Brexit.
We identify conceptual patterns and change in human thought through a combination of distant text reading and corpus linguistics techniques
Identifying conceptual patterns and change in human thought through a combination of distant text reading and corpus linguistics techniques.
