Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop

On 2 May 2025, Dr Eoin McElroy demonstrated Harmony at the MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop in Deutsche Bank. Eoin’s presentation focused on “Maximising the use of existing survey data: facilitating cross-study research using retrospective harmonization.” The workshop brought together researchers interested in applying novel harmonisation techniques to existing datasets.

Eoin explained traditional harmonisation processes and presented a user-friendly guide to the Harmony tool, demonstrating how natural language processing can streamline the harmonisation process.

The agenda of the event was:

Workshop title: Maximising the use of existing survey data: facilitating cross-study research using retrospective harmonization
Harmonised data - recap
Retrospective harmonization using a content validation approach
Retrospective harmonization using natural language processing: a guide to the Harmony tool
Testing the equivalence of your harmonizaed data: a brief guide
Harmonization exercise

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

Since we built Harmony, a common complaint has been that it frequently identifies the wrong questions in PDFs. The original algorithm for finding questions in PDFs was a mixture of rule based heuristics and some hand coded logic to look for e.g. lines in the document which begin with numbers. This was very fragile and worked fine on short questionnaires such as the GAD-7, but failed on larger documents. We decided to run a competition with our partner DOXA AI where members of the public could train their own model to extract questions from PDFs.

'Send to Harmony' Chrome plugin

[Beta mode: we are currently testing this extension] We have developed a browser extension for Harmony called “Send to Harmony” which lets you send selected text to Harmony with a right-click. For PDFs, use the popup to paste your selected text. Send to Harmony enables users to send selected text to the Harmony Data Harmonization (https://harmonydata.ac.uk/) platform for analysis. This plugin provides a right-click or context menu item which allows users to easily bring text from into their harmonisations, making it easier to compare and analyze different measurement scales across research studies.

Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop

Related Posts

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

'Send to Harmony' Chrome plugin

Signup to our newsletter