Researchers in English Linguistics from the School of Arts, Languages and Culture were keen to enhance an existing project website, which allows visitors to view scans and transcriptions of historic documents from the John Rylands collection. A series of enquiries eventually lead them to the Research Software Engineers in Research IT.

Traditionally the first step in interpreting video is to code it into a form that can be analysed systematically. The coding process is currently performed manually, and it can be slow and difficult, and biased by subjectivity. David Mawdsley (Research IT) recently presented a poster at the first “Advances in Data Science” conference explaining how we are helping Dr Caroline Jay’s group develop a way to quickly code human behaviours allowing the rapid analysis of hours of video.

Have you ever wondered if your shopping habits could be influenced? Do you buy the same groceries every week? Would extra information allow you to make informed choices when you do your online shop? Research IT helped a group of researchers who were trying to see if they could make consumers change their mind.

A mobile phone app developed by Research IT has been hitting the headlines recently. Featured on ITV news and Granada Reports as well as in The Daily Mirror, the Manchester Evening News and local newspapers across the region, Linguasnapp is enabling researchers to identify the range of languages used in Manchester.

Our Research software engineers (RSEs) are helping researchers in the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research launch a tool for sharing best practice in study design and management. The Extant Study Catalogue will allow researchers at Manchester and further afield to share details of their study design, datasets and coding practices, with a view to developing a shared data dictionary that can be used to make studies more easily comparable.

Two members of Research IT are co-authors on a recently published paper in BMC Ecology. The paper describes the development and implementation of "BioVeL" - a virtual laboratory for data analysis and modelling in biodiversity science and ecology.

LinguaSnapp is a project to create multilingual landscape maps of cities round the world by crowdsourcing data from the public. Last year Research IT created a mobile app and web application for the project to focus on the city of Manchester.