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Researchers

Data to insight. Insight to knowledge.
Knowledge to impact.

Climate change, economic inequality, food insecurity, political instability, and threats to public health—all undermine the well-being of people worldwide. As a social scientist, humanist, or data scientist, you stand at the forefront of studying these complex issues. By analyzing decades or even centuries of raw text, you can help make the connections that bring about global solutions.


What if you had a partner that provided the data, tools, and methods to make the vast amount of text analysis less daunting? The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research equips and empowers researchers to address key challenges that threaten human flourishing by applying advanced computational techniques to extract structured insights out of millions of news stories from around the world. We help you transform information into knowledge, so you can understand—and address—pressing societal issues that affect the well-being of people around the world.

What kind of researcher are you?

Data science for the global good.

When you’re a researcher in a STEM field, processing and visualizing data can be easier than making sense of what it says. Unless you also have an advanced degree in a domain specialty, mastering the literatures needed to create theoretically relevant findings for a different disciplinary audience often requires far more time than you can afford to give.

We’re here to help. The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research connects computational expertise in the data sciences with subject-matter expertise in the social sciences and humanities in ways that address pressing societal problems around the world.

The result? Insights, knowledge, and understanding, with potential to improve the well-being of people worldwide.

Give voice to data. At extreme scales.

When you’re a researcher in a non-STEM field, processing and visualizing a seemingly never-ending amount of raw text can be overwhelming—at best. And unless you have an advanced degree in computer science, mastering the skills to build analytics workflows and text-mining algorithms can slow your progress significantly.

We’re here to help. The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research develops next-generation data, tools, and techniques that place the power of data analytics squarely into the hands of social scientists and digital humanists. We provide new approaches for analyzing news texts at extreme scales in valid ways, so you can better hear what the data’s telling you.

The result? Insights, knowledge, and understanding, with potential to improve the well-being of people worldwide.

Data science for the
global good.

The Cline Center seeks to connect data science and engineering experts with researchers in the humanities and social sciences to improve lives around the world. Key to this effort is the Cline Center affiliates network that includes faculty, students, and staff from over a dozen departments across six colleges at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cline Center affiliates at collaborating institutions come from more than a dozen universities spread over five continents.

We also support a wide range of teaching and outreach activities, from fellowship programs for faculty and graduate students to undergraduate internships, public lectures, and topical symposia.

With these programs and connections in place we hope to empower research that addresses and answers some of the crucial challenges that threaten human flourishing.