PhD student selected for international award to support research on the UK Parliament

First year PhD student, Nicole Nisbett, has been selected for a Transnational Access funded by the European SoBigData Research Infrastructure for big data and social mining.

This allows her to visit and work with the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Laboratory which is a joint venture between University of Pisa’s Department of Computer Science and Italy’s Institute of Science and Technology Information. She will be able to call on their expertise in network analysis, text analysis, and social data mining to analyse her own data and provide valuable input to the UK Parliament’s understanding of their data.

Nicole will have access to software and skills which she would otherwise not have, and the Transnational Access will allow her to greatly enhance her research outputs and inform her wider research.

Nicole’s research is a collaborative project with the UK House of Commons and focuses on understanding the impact of Parliament’s online public engagement activities. The PhD is supervised by Professor Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Dr Viktoria Spaiser, and funded by a White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership (WRDTP) ESRC collaborative award.