Dear all,

My name is Christian Howard-Sukhil, and I am the Text & Data Mining Legal Fellow at a non-profit organization called Authors Alliance. Authors Alliance has received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to learn about how academic researchers are using Text and Data Mining (TDM) in their research. TDM is known by several other names in the academy, including topic modeling, distant reading, text mining for Digital Humanities, and textual analysis and data mining. The project examines how academics engage in TDM for their research as well as difficulties (especially legal issues) that such researchers face in conducting their studies.

As part of these efforts, we are seeking information from TDM practitioners and support staff to help us understand how they engage in TDM, barriers that they have faced in conducting such research, and ways in which their TDM research could be improved. While our focus is particularly about legal issues in the United States, we welcome insights from TDM scholars anywhere, especially if such scholars have collaborated or hope to collaborate with US researchers.

If you are an academic researcher or support staff engaged in TDM and you are willing to have a 30-45 minute Zoom conversation to discuss your experiences, please email me directly at christian@authorsalliance.org to schedule a meeting. We are happy to keep your information confidential if preferred.

Your willingness to share your experiences could materially affect future laws surrounding Text and Data Mining for academic researchers, so any information that you are willing to share would be greatly appreciated.

Please also feel free to forward this message to other scholars you may know who are engaged in TDM.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or would like additional information.

Thank you,
Christian