As social media sites like Twitter and Facebook explode in popularity, researchers in a variety of fields are turning to social media for data to study. But although plenty of social media analytics tools exist, they’re not always accessible to those without a computational science background.
Social Media Macroscope, an environment powered by Purdue’s open-source HUBzero platform, presents a solution to that problem – users simply log onto the site and use data analytics tools through a web interface, no coding required. Instead of having to write a program to access and parse data from a site such as Twitter, obtaining the relevant data is as simple as entering in search terms.
“We could have built a whole environment for ourselves, but it just didn’t make sense when we saw that HUBzero had already done that for us at a very low cost,” says Joseph Yun, Social Media Macroscope’s principal investigator and the leader of the Social Research and Technology Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As participants in HUBzero’s No Hassle Hub option, the Social Media Macroscope team has relied on customization and support from the HUBzero team. “Everything’s been taken care of very promptly,” says Yun of HUBzero’s ticketing support system.
Social Media Macroscope isn’t just for data science novices. It’s also a place where computational scientists can share the models they’ve created and make them available to non-experts.
Yun cites the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) as an example of a tool that’s reached a wider audience through Social Media Macroscope. As code sitting on GitHub, it wasn’t accessible to non-programmers. But with Social Media Macroscope, using VADER is as simple as selecting the tool from a drop-down menu and pressing the ‘run’ button.
Writer: Adrienne Miller, technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Full article: HUBzero powers Social Media Macroscope, making social media data analysis available to anyone
Set a goal this year to attend a Science Gateways Bootcamp, offered by the Science Gateways Community Institute. Step away from your day-to-day management tasks, and spend time with your team during this Incubator-organized Bootcamp.
During this week-long intensive workshop, the instructors ask big questions. What is your funding model? How do your users see value in your gateway or Hub? The Bootcamp covers areas that you might not have had time to consider.
Hub teams Aquavit, Canarie, EcologyPlus, MyGeoHub, nanoHUB, PlantingScience, QUBESHub, Social Media Macroscope, and VIDIA have taken advantage of the Bootcamp and have significantly benefited from the experience in different ways.
Sign your team up for the next Bootcamp, which will be May 13th-17th, 2019 in Indianapolis, IN. Apply through the online form to take advantage of this excellent opportunity: https://sciencegateways.org/engage/bootcamp/apply. Applications are due by March 22nd, 2019.
The loss of funding or end of a grant can have adverse impacts on a research community. OneSciencePlace gives your research community life beyond a funding cycle. OneSciencePlace is a preserve for research communities, databases, software applications, and publications, which will officially launch on December 13th. Users of OneSciencePlace can join one community or partner with multiple communities to share data across disciplines.
With OneSciencePlace, you gain access to community spaces where you can discuss amongst your peers, download open access data, publish new discoveries, and run simulations. Other amenities, such as connection to various file systems, will be provided on OneSciencePlace with more to come.
OneSciencePlace is built by the team that brought you the HUBzero platform, a powerful content management system built to support scientific activities, and operated by the HUBzero Foundation.
Your hub, science gateway, or active learning community can move into OneSciencePlace by writing OneSciencePlace into your current funding budget as your sustainability solution. Contact us for more information by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
A team led by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) Research Computing Senior Research Scientist Carol Song has been awarded a five-year, $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a “plug and play” platform to allow researchers to easily access and process geospatial data.
Song describes GeoEDF as a successor to the Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks (GABBs), a project Song led that developed web-based geospatial data visualization, analysis, and modeling tools and made them accessible to users on the science gateway MyGeoHub. GABBs is open source and is available to anyone, regardless of affiliation with Purdue. A geospatial gateway enabled by GABBs software can be set up on cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services.
Despite the advent of geospatial data processing tools accessible even to non-programmers, data challenges remain in this area. Many geospatial data repositories lack standard interfaces and don’t provide data in a way that researchers can immediately use. Moreover, as field sensors become increasingly common, large volumes of streaming data are created, including so-called “crowdsourced” data generated by citizen scientists. GeoEDF’s data processing pipeline will help researchers retrieve and process only the data they need, and transform it into standardized formats.
Song has a number of scientists as co-principal investigators who will serve as use cases for GeoEDF. One of her co-PIs, Jian Jin, an assistant professor at Purdue Unversity of agricultural and biological engineering, is developing a handheld crop scanner that will allow farmers to get information about the health of their plants just by scanning a leaf. GeoEDF will include a way to automatically upload and store the data generated by use of these sensors, as well as data analysis tools that can be used to study plant health and growth.
Song’s other co-PIs are:
GeoEDF will have interoperability with other national geospatial cyberinfrastructures, including Hydroshare, an open source system for sharing hydrologic data and models. This interoperability will ensure users can seamlessly leverage the capabilities of different infrastructures. Like MyGeoHub, GeoEDF will be built on HUBzero.
Writer: Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Full article: https://www.itap.purdue.edu/newsroom/180918_GeoEDF.html