Three new grants fund Big Data research in the Arts

Researchers from the University of Glasgow have been awarded grants to fund three major research projects to help analyse and evaluate 'big data'. A pilot for the first comprehensive Historical Thesaurus of the Scots Language, a unique teaching resource to aid phonetic training and new software to enhance lexical searches within texts, have all been funded as part of a funding package announced today by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities projects call. The three projects being led by academics at the University of Glasgow are: A Pilot Historical Thesaurus of Scots - Dr Susan Rennie - The first stage of compiling the first ever comprehensive Historical Thesaurus of Scots (HTS), which will classify every word in the Scots language from earliest records to the present day.The - ' Dynamic Dialects ' project - Professor Jane Stuart-Smith - Create online resources that show the hidden movements of the tongue and other organs inside the vocal tract during real speech, using latest anatomical imaging and digital techniques. Designed to aid phonetic training, language teaching and learning, and speech therapy. Semantic Annotation and Mark Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches - Dr Marc Alexander - Delivering a system for automatically annotating words in texts with their precise meanings, enabling a step-change in the way we deal with large textual data. This will then be used to begin to analyse the meaning of every word uttered in Parliament over the past two hundred years, as well as almost all the books and pamphlets published in English before 1700.