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’s no need to book a spot to make use of this service: we welcome anyone with minor methodological issues to drop by for a quick word of advice, free of charge.

CONSULTANCY

For researchers that would like a more in-depth discussions of the issues they’re confronted with, we offer free one-hour consultancy meetings that can be booked through our website. Every researcher of the university is entitled to one such meeting per project per year.

PRIVATE COACHING

In case a single coaching session does not suffice, we also offer private coaching services for, for example, PhD students, who would like us to assist them with the methodological side of their projects at various stages of their research. This type of service consists of a series of free one-hour consultancy meetings over a longer span of time. Because this is more time-intensive on our side, we expect researchers who opt in on this service to disseminate the methodology they ended up using to the research group they are part of and assist their colleagues in the implementation of these methods in their own research.

TUTORIALS AND WORKSHOPS

Through the VUB’s doctoral schools, we offer a series of trainings and workshops for PhD students of various backgrounds and skill levels to enable them to tackle common forms of digital text analysis issues all by themselves. This series of workshops will be supported by a website with templates and tutorials that is freely available for all staff members of the VUB.

GRANT APPLICATIONS

Researchers who want to incorporate some kind of digital text analysis into their prospective projects are welcome to book a free appointment with us. As always, advice is free of charge, but if the project requires us to perform a custom analysis, write dedicated code or software, we expect the cost of these services to be factored in in the grant application.

OUTSOURCING

Researchers or research groups who have large bodies of textual data that need to be collected, cleaned, analysed or visualised but feel unable to do so themselves, are welcome to submit their datasets to us and have the work performed for them. As this type of consultancy is more time-intensive on our side, this is a paid service. The final cost of this service depends on the researcher’s status (VUB-internal or external) and the reusability of the solutions provided: if the researcher agrees to disclose their data or the software written to analyse it for the wider research community, a discount may be provided.

TAILORED SOLUTIONS

Finally, we also provide support for large projects that require custom software solutions or data analysis pipelines. As this is the most time and labour-intensive type of service, it will always be paid, regardless of whether the customer is a VUB researcher or not. As with outsourcing, the exact fees depend on the researcher’s status (VUB-internal or external) and the reusability of the solutions provided: if the researcher agrees to disclose their data or the software written to analyse it for the wider research community, a discount may be provided.