Open office hours
Every Thursday, B-TXT holds open office between 10AM and 4PM in room B 5.47 at the VUB main campus in Elsene. There is no need to book a spot: drop by for a quick word of advice about a minor methodological issue, free of charge.
Services
B-TXT helps researchers move from an initial question to a workable digital-text research practice. Start with free advice, build confidence through training or coaching, or ask us to take on a larger technical or methodological task.
Start with a question
For quick decisions and early-stage project planning, our free services help you work out what is possible and what the next step should be.
Consultancy
For a more in-depth discussion of a research question, book a free one-hour consultancy meeting through our booking page. Every VUB researcher is entitled to one meeting per project per year.
Private coaching
When one conversation is not enough, we can provide a series of free one-hour consultancy meetings over a longer span of your research. This option is useful for PhD researchers and others who need ongoing methodological support. We ask participants to share what they learn with their research group.
Grant applications
If you want to include digital text analysis in a future project, book a free appointment through our booking page. Advice is free; if the project needs a custom analysis, dedicated code, or software, we can help you factor that work into the grant application.
Learn to do more yourself
Through the VUB’s doctoral schools, we offer training and workshops for PhD researchers from different backgrounds and skill levels. They cover common digital-text analysis challenges and are supported by templates and tutorials that are freely available to VUB staff.
Tutorials and workshops
Build practical skills for working with textual data, from getting access to the B-TXT toolsuite to choosing and applying a method.
Commission a larger piece of work
When a project needs more time, specialised expertise, or software built around a particular research question, B-TXT can work with you on a paid basis. We scope the work with you in advance and take your affiliation, project size, and the reusability of the resulting solution into account.
Outsourcing
Submit a large body of textual data for us to collect, clean, analyse, or visualise when your team does not have the capacity or expertise to do it in-house. This is a paid service. A discount may be available when the data or software can be shared with the wider research community.
Tailored solutions
For larger projects, we provide custom software solutions and data-analysis pipelines. This work is always paid, whether the customer is a VUB researcher or an external partner. Fees depend on the researcher’s status and the reusability of the solution.
Understand the costs
Initial advice and the free services above remain free. Larger project work and annual support contracts are priced according to scope, affiliation, and the reusability of the solution.