4 Reasons Nexis® Data Lab is the Ultimate Hands-On Teaching Tool for Academic Research & Analysis

“As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.” Steven Johnson, host of the PBS series How We Got to Now and the podcast American Innovations, isn’t the first to refer to academic institutes as ivory towers, but he makes an important point. In this big data-driven world,  providing students with research and analytics tools takes them out of theoretical ivory towers and into practical application of theory to develop innovative solutions to real-world problems. It’s the edge they’ll need when entering a job market where data science experience counts. Nexis^® Data Lab makes it possible.

Conduct academic research in an environment designed for it

Big data fits naturally with education, but universities are often reluctant to allocate funds from shrinking budgets to invest in infrastructure. That’s where Nexis Data Lab can deliver measurable value. As Nexis Solutions president Todd Larsen noted when this powerful research and analytics tool was launched, “With Nexis Data Lab, we deliver a system that’s fully administered on our end and has a very simple yet powerful workspace.”

1.    Turnkey research and analytics tool

Nexis Data Lab is a controlled environment where students and faculty can execute academic research within their own workspaces. Students can dive right in, using the industry-standard Jupyter notebook environment—minus the costs or technical limitations of on-premises hosting. Plus, since it’s a self-service solution, librarians spend less time managing user IDs and juggling password issues, leaving more time for helping students and faculty make the most of the data available. And that’s just the beginning of the benefits.

2.    Datasets ideal for academic research

Students need access to big data to learn how to creatively solve problems. Don’t relegate the access to idealized datasets or messy open sources that force students to spend more time wrangling data than experimenting with it. Nexis Data Lab taps into an enormous data collection spanning news, legal information, patents and more. The result? Your students get valuable experience working with the same data that companies worldwide rely on to inform business decisions, manage their brands, and mitigate risk. With this data science teaching tool, students can tap into thousands of documents in minutes, whether they’re interested in using news to train machine learning algorithms or analyzing patents data to predict innovation and industry trends.

3.    Enrichments for drilling through big data

Encountering messy data is in every data scientist’s future—even those at university. Fortunately, Nexis Data Lab features data that is normalized and enriched with metadata and index tags based on our world-leading taxonomy for News and Business in nine languages—English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and Arabic. Data is classified based on subjects, industries, companies, people and places and includes relevancy scores to help filter out the noise. As a result, students can easily refine search parameters to improve results relevance before they even move on to the next phase of using the data.

4.    Visuals-based analysis supports learning

In addition to enabling hands-on experience, Nexis Data Lab is an ideal teaching tool for preparing students for a crucial component of turning data into action: storytelling. Your students don’t just need to know how to manipulate data. Choosing the questions to be answered and designing solutions to derive those insights is the easy part. Learn to effectively communicate the outcomes of complex data analysis, both to technical and non-technical audiences. Nexis Data Lab features pre-packaged Python or R notebook libraries to kick-start analysis, as well as the ability to use custom code, for text of visuals-based analysis. From there, students can export findings—without having to download the entire dataset—for creating presentations to add the context and present the story unlocked from the data.

Take a closer look! Arrange a trial of Nexis Data Lab to experience the teaching power of this research tool for universities.