The New Copyright Directive: Text and Data Mining (Articles 3 and 4) - Kluwer Copyright Blog

"Art. 2(2) of the DSM Directive defines ‘text and data mining’ as “any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form in order to generate information which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations”. Text and data mining (TDM) generally refers to the computer-based analysis of large bodies of data in order to gain knowledge.

With the increasing powers of computer processing and the omnipresence of vast amounts of minable text and data on the Internet, TDM has become a hugely important research tool in science and many other domains. For example, in linguistics TDM can be used to analyze large bodies of text to extract syntactic or grammatical patterns. TDM is also applied in numerous other scientific domains, ranging from astronomy to musicology to the social sciences. Outside the world of science proper, data mining plays a growing role in the arts, as the spectacular Next Rembrandt project that produced an amazing Rembrandt-like portrait based on mining Rembrandt’s oeuvre, reveals."