Bot Project Update In early January we advertised on the AoIR listserve for coders. More than 50 people applied (in just 90 minutes) and we offered work to ten. A small group of coders ultimately began exploring the bot problem in Twitter data. What resulted is a work in progress. It is intended to be a collaborative resource for anyone interested in the challenge that bots pose to academic research, democracy, civil society, data-driven journalism, and any other realm of life where bots are causing issues. We invite your comments about the project. http://bit.ly/2BNO67Z New Paper of Note Many DiscoverText studies feature Twitter data. It was nice to see an ambitious new coding project emerge using Reddit data. Please have a close look at the methods details here as they are illustrative of the collaborative challenges when labeling any text data. http://bit.ly/2H1FJoC CoderRank Conference Paper For the first time in several years, we have written our own conference paper about the core collaborative annotation methods that underly our approach to humans and machines learning together. You can read it here and we welcome comments. http://bit.ly/2EQNmNS Important New Paper on the Twitter APIs Rebekah Tromble and Daniela Stockmann have a superb new paper out shedding light into the dark corners of the Twitter Search and Streaming APIs. This is an absolute must read paper for anyone who uses Twitter data in academic research. They note: "List count, verified, hashtag count, and reply are statistically significant and positively correlated with the likelihood of Search API capture." http://bit.ly/2nVtXTS Gnip Twitter Metadata Dictionary We get this question in many forms: what do the labels in Gnip Twitter metadata mean? As one of the original group of Gnip Twitter data vendors, we have witnessed the amazing evolution of this data. Sometimes our DiscoverText users are looking to create a filtering “rule” to apply against the realtime Gnip PowerTrack. Other times, they have used Sifter to collect historical Twitter data and they are trying to interpret the metadata payload that includes field names like “twitter quoted status actor followers count.” http://bit.ly/2nTurKb Free Web Training Sessions If you would like to schedule a 30-minute DiscoverText web briefing, we have a number of openings over the remainder of February. Schedule a meeting here. https://calendly.com/discovertext/discovertext-web-briefing Campus Visits Like other small business owners with academic software solutions, I make regular visits to universities to offer free methods workshops. Attendees get a sponsored multi-user account for 6 months at no cost. The methods are solid, interdisciplinary innovations that will change the way you think about the role of human coders and machine-learning. Please send an email to info@texifter.com if your librarians at your university would like to host a cost-free event. If there is anything we can do to help with your text analytics needs, just let us know. There are a number of new features emerging in the software every month. Thanks, ~Stu -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Founder and CEO, Texifter