An Introduction to Text and Data Mining (TDM)
By Ruth Wainman, on 14 January 2019
What is TDM?
There are various definitions of Text and Data Mining (TDM) which cover both the technicalities and utilities of the practice. The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) usefully define TDM as: ‘The use of automated analytical techniques to analyse text and data for patterns, trends and other useful information’. Even within TDM, there are different definitions for both text and data mining. Text mining is more commonly seen as the computational process of discovering and extracting knowledge from unstructured data. Data mining, on the other hand, is the computational process of discovering and extracting knowledge from structured data. There has been a surge of interest in the use of TDM in academia across all disciplines ranging from the sciences to the humanities. Yet undertaking TDM has also entailed a whole host of legal and political issues, which have nearly threatened to hinder the practice. These issues have largely centred around copyright, intellectual property rights, licenses and download limits.