EDINA at The University of Edinburgh have won seed funding from the City Region Deal to develop a new text and data mining (TDM) software service. We’re building an entry-level tools for students, teachers and local businesses who want to make sense of data but don’t know how.

TDM isn’t just for academics. It can help businesses to analyse big volumes of text or data in order to spot patterns, trends and relationships, and get a sense of common topics or feelings – like with online reviews.

Our challenge

We want to speak to people who can help us understand what kind of data or digital information small businesses have, and what they’d like to do with it. We’re interested in finding out if you’ve heard of text and data mining before, or if you’re already using some text mining techniques. You might be doing it without even realising.

And if not, what particular challenges and problems are stopping you from using your data to make better business decisions?

Eligibility

In order to take part, we’re looking for small businesses that:

• Use data to make decisions in your day-to-day operations – or have an ambition to do this in the next few years. This data could be from reviews, sales and transactions, written reports and research, operational spreadsheets, social media feeds, customer relationship management software. We’re open to suggestions!
• Are based in and/or undertake work that has impact in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland region.

There’s no minimum or maximum on company size, and we’d like to hear from small businesses in all sectors.

Take part

If you’d like to take part, get in touch with the EDINA team via email on carol.blackwood@ed.ac.uk and let us know:

• A little more about your business – who you are, what sector you work in, what size your business is
• What kind of data or digital information you already use, and how you’d like to use it better
• What kind of sessions you’d be able to participate in: 1-to-1 interviews, group workshops, real-time observation sessions while you work, and/or testing a new software prototype.

We also have bursaries available to help you take part in these sessions.

Deadline for responses: 10am on 13 December 2019.