Text Mining for Innovation & Research Studies – Summer School

Event: Text Mining for Innovation & Research Studies – Summer School
Dates: Thursday 25th – Friday 26th June 2026
Location: Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow

Are you a postgraduate researcher (PhD candidate), postdoctoral researcher, early career researcher (within 8 years of PhD completion), policy analyst, or data professional working in innovation, research policy, or science & technology studies? Want to understand or expand your knowledge of using text as data? This event is for you!

The IRC are delighted to be collaborating with the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, University of Pisa and Goldsmiths University to provide a two-day, hands-on summer school designed to build your skills in text mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyse research and innovation data. These methods can be used to answer a wide variety of research questions across science, technology and innovation policy, public perceptions of new innovation, to what makes successful funding applications. Text mining can open opportunities for researchers to explore themes, meanings and patterns at scales that would be difficult to achieve through manual qualitative analysis alone.

No prior experience of text mining or coding is required to attend this summer school, just an interest in the techniques and an idea of how you might apply them in your research.

This intensive training will combine theoretical foundations with live demonstrations, guided labs, and group-based practical work using research funding data (Gateway to Research) and other relevant textual sources. Participants will learn how to retrieve, clean, analyse, and visualise text data — and how to translate these insights into meaningful contributions for innovation & research policy stakeholders. You will also have the opportunity to network throughout the summer school, including at a complimentary dinner, with senior scholars working on related topics and policy actors from across the funding and research landscape.

What you will learn:
• Fundamental text analysis and pre-processing techniques
• How to retrieve and work with textual data in Innovation & Research Studies
• Topic modelling, sentiment analysis, NER, and transformer-based approaches
• How to apply text mining techniques to real research funding datasets
• How to present reproducible, impactful findings

A preliminary agenda can be found here.

You’ll be learning directly from an international team of leading experts: Dr Fillipo Chiarello, Dr Vito Giordano (University of Pisa), Dr Ivan Zupic (Goldsmiths), Dr Kevin Walsh (Innovation & Research Caucus / Oxford Brookes University) and Dr Lauren Tuckerman (Innovation & Research Caucus / University of Glasgow).

Key deadlines:
• 16 March – Applications open
• 1 May – Applications close
• 15 May – Outcomes communicated
• 29 May – Registration deadline

We will evaluate your application according to the following criteria:

1. How well your research aligns with the topics of the summer school
2. Potential for research to benefit from text based approaches
3. Potential for impacting the UK Innovation & Research ecosystem with text-based research

For questions, contact Lauren Tuckerman: lauren.tuckerman@glasgow.ac.uk