Visualizing Social Science Research in an Institutional Repository

Abstract

Using text mining and visualization techniques to identify the topical coverage of text corpora is increasingly common in a number of disciplines. When these approaches are applied to the titles and abstracts of articles published in an academic journal, it yields insight into the evolution of scholarly content in the journal. Similarly, text mining and visualization can reveal the topical coverage of items archived in an institutional repository. This poster will present initial results from mining the text and visualizing the abstracts of social science research in one university’s institutional repository. Generating a topic map visually demonstrates how research in a repository clusters around specific domains in the social sciences. These topic maps are potentially useful to librarians and researchers seeking to learn more about the topical coverage of items in their repository and determine if the research is reflective of the scholarly output from an institution more broadly.