Visualising data after Covid

New partnerships, projects and the founding of the Concept Analytics Lab

In spring 2021 Justyna Robinson (English Language and Linguistics) was awarded central HEIF funding of £26k for a project that involved working collaboratively with a non-academic stakeholder to support health, social and economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.  Justyna partnered with business Africa New Energies (ANE) as well as an academic stakeholder (Mass Observation Project, The Keep) to carry out the project on creating a ‘Post-COVID visualisation tool to analyse socio-economic and demographic data in the UK’.

Justyna and her team aimed to discover and visualise the impact of the pandemic on business, economy, and everyday life. The uniqueness of the project lay in its locating of significant but non-intuitive changes in behaviour and thinking patterns that occurred during the pandemic. 5,000 diary-like narratives submitted to the Mass Observation Project (2019-2021) were mined and cross-referenced with writers-authors’ location and socio-demographic characteristics to produce an API (application planning interface) of a database inclusive of embedded developed algorithms and a Corpus of Covid-19 Diaries.

The collaboration with match-funding partner ANE was pivotal in developing a visualisation tool. ANE is a London-based business with offices across South Africa. They brought to the project extensive expertise in visualisation of absolute physical data and geo-mapping. Most of their visualisations have been developed in relation to energy detection, use, and optimisation. Their projects include population clustering for energy demand, solar radiation and wind heat maps, or using satellite data in search for oil presence through measuring vegetation stress and hydrocarbon micro-seepage. However, ANE has limited experience in visualising unstructured datasets (such as language) so they sought collaboration with an expert in linguistics to help them develop this angle for their portfolio and future projects.  They also tasked the team with a providing a report on Covid-19 changes in work-related practices specifically. 

The outcome of this collaboration is a prototype of a visualisation tool for analysing text/unstructured data. The research energy that the HEIF funding created, together with the analytical tools and the know-how, directly resulted in the founding of the Concept Analytics Lab (currently sitting within the structures of the Sussex Humanities Lab).

The Lab has already been commissioned by the PETRA project (UKPRP/MRC: Preventing Disease using Trade Agreements (PETRA) to analyse linguistic data using tools developed in this HEIF-funded project.

The Concept Analytics Lab has secured further HEIF funding in 2022 of £30k for the ‘Development of API and visualisation tools to discover post-Covid-19 changes in energy consumption in UK households’. ANE’s successful previous collaboration with Sussex led to ANE matching funds in order to discover changes in consumers’ energy use and waste/recycling habits/activities in the UK. The Concept Analytics Lab will use this opportunity to implement a new layer of expanded functionality to the API and visualisation tools.