Winter term 2021/22: Project seminar groups work exploratively and with the help of advanced tools with extended metadata

As part of the regular project seminar for Master's students preparing for their Master's thesis, students dealt under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Christoph Bläsi in the winter semester 2021/22 on the one hand with issues surrounding extended metadata and on the other hand "instrumentally" with how to effectively process extensive unstructured data and present project results simply but "appetisingly" to fellow students and the public. The teaching project was gratefully supported by the Gutenberg Institute's Book & Reading Studies Department by funding research assistant Vanessa Möschner.

The projects of the four groups dealt with the challenge of having to work with an unmanageable number of books in order to answer questions, but needing more information than standard metadata from the library and book trade provide (assuming that access to the full texts is not an option).

Such questions include, for example, the comparison of different bestseller lists, the question of the role of books in agenda setting or applications that recommend books to readers of certain books (or listeners of certain music !) that are likely to be liked (and not just have the genre in common, for example).

An important role in the project work was played by the tools offered by the Centre for Data Processing of the Johannes Gutenberg University for qualitative content analysis (MaxQDA) on the one hand and, more recently, for the presentation of project results (or more generally: portfolios) (Mahara).

Here you can see the inspiring work results of the four working groups in Mahara:

Cross-Media Recommendation:
https://mahara.vcrp.de/view/view.php?t=iez8hEAbYrQKP1Jc7ygB

Recommendation systems:
https://mahara.vcrp.de/view/view.php?t=FsYhvGLdyxCcM5m6Vr4K

Bestseller list comparison:
https://mahara.vcrp.de/view/view.php?t=49RWk0pNtxZyL1Yfmw63

Agenda Setting:
https://mahara.vcrp.de/view/view.php?t=G0tKyxkq1Wv7sDd5AaUC