Acclaimed Professor Leyland Pitt on Unstructured Text Analysis
08 October, 2019
On Thursday 5th September 2019, UCT had the honour of holding a research seminar by the esteemed Professor Leyland Pitt, who is the Dennis F. Culver EMBA Alumni Chair of Business (Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Distinguished Fellow in Marketing (Hanken School of Economics, Finland). The prolific marketing professor has over 350 publications in leading peer-reviewed journals.
"80% of all the world’s data are unstructured, including user-generated texts, blogs, photos, videos, social media updates... all highly qualitative formats that do not follow well-defined sets of rules," said Prof Pitt. "Many tools have been developed to enable researchers to make sense of this data. These include dictionary-based software such as LIWC and DICTION, neural network-based graphical interpretation packages such as Leximancer, artificial intelligence suites such as IBM’s Watson, and, bibliographic analysis tools such as VOSViewer." In his research seminar, Prof Pitt introduced these tools and explained how they can be used to analyse unstructured text for research, by referring to recent publications that employ them.
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UCT master’s degrees pull international students
30 January, 2019
They come from far and wide: from Zimbabwe, Haiti, Latvia, Monaco and the Falkland Islands, a diverse enrolment of 605 new international students who will be studying at the University of Cape Town (UCT) this year.
UCT’s 29 000-strong student body has 5 000 international students from 117 countries outside South Africa. With 776 students at UCT, Zimbabwe tops the list for international recruits, followed by the United States (596), Kenya (193), Namibia (193), Nigeria (192) and Zambia (183).
A significant number of the international newbies have applied for master’s degree programmes, a trend that’s evident across all six academic faculties. Registrations show the Faculty of Health Sciences leads with 57 international master’s candidates, followed by the Faculty of Science with 44, and the Faculty of Commerce with 42.
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Burst of energy from new UCT lecturers
13 December, 2018
Twenty new, full-time academics have celebrated their completion of the New Academic Practitioners’ Programme (NAPP), a holistic programme of professional development for new lecturers at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
Over the six-month programme, they’ve brought with them energy, new ways of looking at the curriculum and innovative ideas about teaching.
The NAPP, which was established in 2004 and is hosted by UCT’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), is open to new full-time academics with not more than five years’ experience in higher education.
The programme starts with a three-day residential retreat in Stellenbosch and includes two one-day workshops on campus. There are two cohorts of 20 participants each, per semester.
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