Based in London, the Quanteda Initiative is a UK non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of open-source text analysis software. It supports active development of these tools, in addition to providing training materials, training events, and sponsoring workshops and conferences. Its main product is the open-source quanteda package for R, but the Quanteda Initiative also supports a family of independent but interrelated packages for providing additional functionality for natural language processing and document management.
Objectives
As an officially designated “community interest company”, the Quanteda Initiative is a special type of limited company which exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders.
Its core objectives, as stated in its charter, are to:
- Support open-source, text analysis software developed for research and scientific analysis. These efforts focus mainly on the open-source software library quanteda, written for the R programming language, and its related family of extension packages.
- Promote interoperability between text analytic software libraries, including those written in other languages such as Python, Java, or C++.
- Provide ongoing user, technical, and development support for open-source text analysis software.
- Organize training and dissemination activities related to open-source text analysis software.
Legal information
The Quanteda Initiative CIC was registered the United Kingdom as a Community Interest Company, company number 11135166.
Registered address:
27 Old Gloucester Street
London WC1N 3AX
United Kingdom
Acknowledgements
The first five years of the quanteda project's development was funded by the European Research Council grant ERC-2011-StG 283794-QUANTESS (PI Kenneth Benoit). Additional funding for user application development is being provided by ERC-2018-PoC-QUANTEDA-812960 (PI Kenneth Benoit).
Additional funding for user-facing applications and community support has been provided by the London School of Economics and Political Science and its Department of Methodology.