Academic publisher SAGE Publishing has made a major seed investment in Thusly Inc., a technology start-up creating research tools for big data analysis of document archives. The investment is the first for SAGE as part of its SAGE Ocean initiative, and will support the launch of Thusly's TagWorks crowd annotation software into the academic research market.
TagWorks enables social science researchers to perform complex content analysis on very large document collections at up to ten times the speed of existing methods. The collaborative tool enables researchers to deeply analyse documents by asking internet-based workers a series of detailed questions to evaluate passages of text. TagWorks is currently being used to identify and report nuanced forms of misinformation in news articles such as 'exaggerated metaphor,' and 'confusion of correlation and causation.'
Thusly Inc. was co-founded by Nick Adams, a sociologist and former research scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and Norman Gilmore, a seasoned software developer with a long term interest in citizen science. The idea for TagWorks was born when Adams's research posed the challenge of closely annotating nearly 10,000 news articles describing events of the Occupy movement.
SAGE Ocean was launched earlier this year to support social scientists working with big data and new technologies. TagWorks joins its growing portfolio of products, which also includes social data science e-learning platform, SAGE Campus.
TagWorks' first customers include the Public Editor project from Goodly Labs, a California-based non-profit evaluating thousands of news articles for social good projects and the History Lab at Columbia University, which is using TagWorks with National Science Foundation support to annotate and curate U.S. State Department cables. TagWorks will also provide ideal human-labeled 'training' data for research projects developing artificial intelligence through supervised machine learning.
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