Mining Meaning: Laura Sheppard on Gender, Academia, and the Power of Public Data

In this episode of The Flux, we talk with Laura Sheppard, a research fellow at University College London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, about how data mining can uncover powerful insights from unexpected sources. Laura shares her work using the British Library’s Ethos dataset, a comprehensive record of UK doctoral theses - to explore gender inequality in higher education. We discuss the process of inferring gender from names, the challenges of working with messy or incomplete data, and how publicly available datasets can be creatively repurposed to answer socially important questions. Laura also touches on her work with The Trussell Trust, combining geographic and census data to map food bank accessibility in the UK.

This conversation is a deep dive into the art and science of data mining, and how thoughtful assumptions, transparent methodology, and a bit of creativity can turn raw data into meaningful research.