‘What are the odds?’ (WATO) was an interdisciplinary collaboration between political scientists and human-computer interaction researchers at Swansea University to try to bring elements of big data to the world of political forecasting. The project used page scraping to gather data on political bets on gambling websites to form a picture of the likely outcome of large public votes.

In recent years, the politics of predicting political events has been front and centre of debates thanks to surprise results in the UK general elections.

While the data collected in WATO was initially intended for presentation to political sciences researchers it was also made available to individual members of the public on a front facing website – tell me the odds.

Designing and building the WATO system raised more questions than it has answered for us; we still need to better understand:

• The role that trust plays in intensely political areas of research and design
• The best ways to present complex gambling data to members of the public without misleading them about it’s reliability
• How we can help members of the public to engage with the analysis of this data in complex, real time transparent ways
• How we can help researcher make use of the large amount of archival data we have and, more generally, what the techniques are to harvest data that is in the public domain, but which doesn’t necessarily want to be

This session will seek to explore all of these issues and more and should be of interest to data scientists, political scientists; social scientists with an interest in big data; or anyone with an opinion on the intersection between politics and research.

TextLab is a Vertically Integrated Project at the University of Strathclyde involving students from the English Literature department and the Computer & Information Science department.

We use tools like:

• AntConc (www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/), a freeware text analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.

• Ubiqu+ity (vep.cs.wisc.edu/ubiq/) which generates statistics and identifies linguistic patterns and groups.

• WordHoard (wordhoard.northwestern.edu/), an application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of texts, largely used on this project for determining the log-likelihoods of specific words and generating word clouds to display this information in a user-friendly manner.

In TextLab we use these programs to analyse the language of Shakespeare and to find patterns and discrepancies that would almost certainly be invisible to the naked eye.

But can we also use them to solve a murder?

To demonstrate the uses of these various tools, we have developed a murder-mystery type scenario in which Romeo (of Romeo and Juliet) has been found murdered while staying in a house with Hamlet, Brutus, and Lady Macbeth. A confession note was found by the body, signed by Brutus, but he claims he is innocent. We will demonstrate how some of these analytical tools could help us identify the killer, simply from the language used in the letter.