Data‐Mining

Abstract

Data‐mining comprises a variety of research tools that can scan, extract, and analyze large quantities of data. It combines mathematical and linguistic analysis methods. Its tools can handle both structured numerical and statistical data sets and unstructured texts. Software tools have been developed that can impose structure upon unstructured texts and extract data that can be numerically coded and analyzed with quantitative techniques. Data‐mining (also known as text‐mining) has given researchers data analysis capabilities that can handle vast quantities of structured and unstructured content stored on the World Wide Web. These analytical techniques can analyze massive amounts of data and identify content patterns and relationships between variables that would be impossible to find otherwise. These techniques have been applied across a wide range of fields including health and political communications, financial data, and scientific data.