My name is Elad Vardi and I am a Data Science PhD research student from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the guidance of Professor Lev Muchnik.
My research requires the use of Wikipedia. To this end, I have devoted significant time and resources in order to organize this data in a manner that would be accessible, speedy, current, and user-friendly.
It occurred to me that this organization of data would be beneficial to other researchers as well.
The emergence of large-scale online digital systems that harvest and mediate access to collective human behavior and knowledge will have an unprecedented impact on social science research. However, many researchers lack the expertise and computational resources necessary to transform the raw data resulting from these systems into meaningful metrics that can be employed in scientific modeling and analysis.
When expertise and computational resources are coincident for individual researchers or research groups, the resulting fruits of their labor are often siloed and seldom shared to the widespread scientific community. In this project, we aim to develop a set of tools that will provide researchers with real-time access to meaningful, rich and context-inclusive metrics on emerging events throughout the world.To accomplish this, we will provide real-time analysis of raw data on the content, context, production and consumption of information on Wikipedia. We will provide API access to high-level measures on emerging events as well as interface tools for visualization, exploration and analysis.
Our end goal is to allow scientific researchers the ability to easily pull the high-level output of these tools and incorporate or embed it into their existing research analysis methodologies without requiring acquisition of advanced technical skills.