Topic Modelling of Research in the Arts and Humanities

This report offers an overview of some novel methods of analysing research funding data. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has worked with Digital Science Consultancy on an exploratory project using innovative techniques to offer new perspectives of the AHRC’s competitively funded research. It has unlocked rich information within the funding data, not through the existing discipline taxonomies but through analysis of the content of application summaries.

This has uncovered changes across time and location, and at varying levels of detail. It’s the first time topic modelling has been applied on a national funding dataset of leading, peer-reviewed research grants activity within the arts and humanities.