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2020 highlights from the world of big data and social research |
Our pick of the year’s top posts on the SAGE Ocean Blog As a long, strange year comes to a close — albeit with a vaccine on the horizon — we look back at some our most popular posts published this year, along with some prescient pieces that we hope have helped guide you through the past 12 months. |
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Researching sharing economies using social media analytics Christina Oberg, PhD, discusses her experience as a business-to-business researcher and her focus on sharing economy and how platforms relate and connect to individuals. |
Highlights from Social Science Bites Some stellar guests have appeared on the acclaimed Social Science Bites podcast this year including Hetan Shah, Chief Executive of the British Academy and Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council. Browse these and other great episodes on Social Science Space. |
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Teaching students quants is hard enough and now I have to do it on MS Teams! “As a teaching team, we pondered how do we build trust and confidence online and at a social distance? All our old ways of doing seemed redundant and the new ways of doing seemed like new barriers to learning, as students felt anxious about learning online.” |
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Your big data and social research roundup |
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Designing trust relationships in research with Knowsi In October, we hosted a webinar with 2020 SAGE Concept Grant winner, Andrew Lovett-Barron on how to design trust relationships with research participants using Knowsi. Knowsi is a portal to manage research participant consent in compliance with In this post, we share the webinar recording and Lovett-Barron writes up the key points he discussed in the webinar as well as answering your questions that he didn’t have time to cover. Get started with Knowsi today by signing up for a free account. If you want to upgrade to the paid-for version, use the code SAGE to get two months free. |
Computational social science & interdisciplinary collaborations Big data has solved one of the problems that social scientists often faced — data scarcity — but to access this data resource, social scientists must learn the language of data science, and collaborate with data scientists in developing relevant methodology for data collection and research. |
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Using natural language processing & Twitter to coordinate disaster relief The coordination of disaster relief using Twitter and natural language processing — including challenges with social media, big data, limited relevant information, misinformation, and what can be learned. |
How to analyze qualitative data with Delve After conducting rounds and rounds of interviews it can feel overwhelming to figure out how to analyze the transcripts and find your insights. In this webinar, Intro to Qualitative Coding with Delve, LaiYee Ho shares introductory concepts for how to utilize qualitative coding to help you make sense of your qualitative data. |
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Your big data and social research roundup |
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Workshop: Supercharging Your Quantitative Online Teaching Join SAGE's Research methods team, the Q Step Centres, the champions of FORRT and an array of guest-speakers for an informal, practical, hands-on workshop exploring best-practice for moving your quantitative research methods training online. The workshop will kick off with a keynote from international bestselling authors of The Distance Learning Playbook for College and University Instruction, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey. This will be followed by a series of breakout sessions designed to share experience and enable collaboration, questions and advice. We will wrap up with a panel discussion and a Q&A session with the speakers. |
Online tutorial Join this free online tutorial to get an introduction to various methods of coding qualitative data. LaiYee Ho, the co-founder of Delve, will walk through different coding techniques and frameworks, and show you how to find meaningful insights in your data. |
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In this blog post, Jihye Lee explains the Human Screenome project at Stanford University, a transdisciplinary effort to produce and analyze a comprehensive record of a person’s digital experience by tracking everything people see and do on their screens in real-time. |
Help to fight COVID-19 misinformation online The team at Public Editor is looking for new participants to join a mission to tackle misinformation online by evaluating news articles for errors in reasoning and misleading information. |
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Online tutorial: Designing trust relationships in research Consent is vital to performing ethical research, but the difficulty of tracking consent and the need to adhere to privacy regulations presents barriers for researchers. Join us for a free online tutorial to learn how to design trust relationships in research and learn more about Knowsi - a new privacy-first platform for researchers to collect, track and manage participant consent. |
Teaching materials Harvard Professor and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science Gary King has recorded all his lectures and made them free to access online. |
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There are so many interesting pieces of research software out there, and lots of you have asked us for help figuring out which one to use. So we’ve decided to run some training and demo sessions on software tools and research methods for the social sciences and now we need your feedback! Which software tool or specific research method would you like to learn more about? Let us know here (it only takes 30 seconds). |
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In this guest blog, computational social science grad student Paul Schuler shares his experience of starting out with data science techniques coming from a background in sociology. Read the blog |
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Teaching and learning social research |
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Five principles to get undergraduates involved in real-world data science projects How do you engage students to participate in research projects during these times of remote learning? Jae Yeon Kim, computational social scientist and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, has been working with community partners and undergraduate research assistants to create a framework for managing research projects effectively. In this blog post, he shares five key takeaways that can be used to help undergraduates get involved in real-world data science projects in a systematic way. |
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Teaching materials for computational social science We’ve compiled a list of open resources from and for teachers, trainers, lecturers and professors that are creating or running courses in computational social science, at any level. |
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Text analysis for social scientists “The single most time-consuming process in my professional life is text cleaning.” If this resonates, read our guide to text analysis for social scientists. |
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Your big data and social research roundup |
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Infodemiology – the analysis of user-generated internet data to inform public health policy – has come a long way in the 12 years since Google Flu Trends was launched. Researchers are now demonstrating, for example, that Google searches for Covid-19 symptoms can track the spread of the disease in advance of official statistics. In this blog post Sam Gilbert, Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, explains the applications and methodological challenges associated with this data, and highlights the datasets and tools that are available to researchers. |
Rich Search and Discovery for Research Datasets This ground-breaking book explores how automating the search for and discovery of datasets can help tackle irreproducibility in social science. Edited by Julia I. Lane, Ian Mulvany and Paco Nathan, the book is available open access for immediate free download. Get your copy |
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Recruiting research participants by email Recruiting research participants and securing their consent is a pain point for researchers across disciplines and methods. In this blog post, SAGE Concept Grant winner Andrew Lovett-Baron guides you through the process and introduces a tool that makes consent management easy. Read the blog |
Kim Heyes on Virtual Ethnography What ethical considerations should you take into account when conducting ethnographic research online? In this video from SAGE Research Methods, Kim Heyes explores the use of ethnographic methodologies for researching in online communities, and examines the ethics around online participation and subject safety. |
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Research in the time of coronavirus |
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COVID-19 has affected research all over the world. With universities closing their campuses and governments issuing restrictions on social gatherings, behavioral research in the lab has ground to a halt. This situation is urgent. Ongoing studies have been disrupted and upcoming studies cannot begin until they are adapted to the new reality. In this post, Jason Radford, CEO Volunteer Science and Research Program Manager at Northeastern University shares recommendations for researchers translating their studies into an online format and recruiting virtual participants. |
Webinar: Transitioning your intro stats course to R Are you considering developing or transitioning your introductory stats class to use R but have questions or concerns? Join this webinar on June 25th to learn the benefits of using and learning R for you and your students, and get a set of resources that can help you take the next steps. |
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Adapting your qualitative methods course for online learning How should teachers of qualitative methods courses re-think their curriculums for online classrooms? How can students conduct observations and work in teams to analyze data if they’re sheltered at home? This blog provides some tips for alternative data collection methods and collaborative tools for remote analysis. |
Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science Festival: Panel discussion on diversity The panelists will discuss their own efforts to increase diversity in computational social science, describe why they think this work is important, explain what other efforts are underway now, and what they think should be done in the future. Find out more |
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| Your big data and social research roundup |
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Six new software tools for social research have been awarded Concept Grants totalling £25,000. As the winner of our £15,000 grant, new tool Knowsi will enable a necessary change in the way researchers manage participant consent in academic studies. With GDPR compliance built in, participants are given autonomy over their data, and researchers can be sure that their processes for managing personal data are ethical, and easy to navigate. Five additional grants of £2,000 go to early-stage software solutions for social research in the digital age. Head to our blog to read our interview with Knowsi creator Andrew Lovett-Barron and sign up to trial Knowsi for free. |
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With the winning teams based across four continents, the £2,000 Concept Grants will enable the development of five new tools that support a range of functions for social scientists working with computational methods and new technologies – from exploratory text analysis to measuring behavioural responses in VR. Read interviews with the winners on our blog. Read the blog |
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Resources to help teach or do research online When working remotely it can be difficult to teach or learn research methods, or carry out your own research. Our research methods colleagues have put together a collection of resources to support this transition. Check it out |
Podcast: Social Science and COVID-19 Listen to Hetan Shah, Chief Executive of the British Academy, discuss how social science has been a force for good in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it can help policymakers understand and shape a better tomorrow. |
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| Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic |
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Hello to all our subscribers. Hope everyone is staying healthy and limiting social interaction as much as possible. This newsletter reflects the response of the global computational social science community as they work to collect, analyze and share data on COVID-19. Drawing from the work of this research community, we’ve compiled a list of the resources available for working with COVID-19 data, including datasets, GitHub repositories and visualizations. Visit our hub to find these, together with examples of the big data response to the outbreak, and tips for handling self-isolation. Do you have resources to share with our community? Email us at ocean@sagepub.com. |
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SAGE Publishing is providing access to a range of free teaching and research materials to support the transition to distance learning. There is also free access to research data and findings relevant to the outbreak. |
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Blog: Mapping and visualizing coronavirus data A list of visualization platforms, interactive COVID-19 maps, and visualization best practices. |
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We have an exciting opportunity for a graduate student to join our Product Management team for a 6 week text mining project. As a SAGE Ocean Fellow, you’ll be helping us to develop a prototype for cleaning and preparing large scale political corpora for text mining. |
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Twitter now explicitly allows the use of its API in academic research, following an update and simplification of its developer policy. |
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Your big data and social research roundup |
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How to anonymize sensitive textual data for research Catch up with the team behind Text Wash, our 2019 Concept Grant winner. In this video collection, the team at UCL explains approaches to text anonymization, and how Text Wash will solve data access challenges for researchers and practitioners. |
Webinar: Supporting academics with text mining |
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“I think AI can help to augment collective intelligence and human endeavours by helping us work out what's important and what isn't important to crunch through the seemingly endless amount of data we have these days”. Hear from Carly Kind, Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute in our new blog post. |
The rise of music streaming platforms Big data, music streaming platforms and the social dynamics of music taste. Read the blog |
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Online courses in social data science Want to give your data science skills a boost? Whether it’s programming, data visualization or text mining, enroll now to join one of SAGE Campus’ courses starting 23 March. |
Events and Deadlines |
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| Your big data and social research roundup |
Diversity and inclusion in academia Talking about gender equality in social data science means talking about the representation of women in tech. It means having a discussion about how as this new community of thought and practice is forming, we have a chance to make it look different than the communities that came before. |
It's time we involve citizens in the AI revolution “AI is not just a technological challenge but a social one as well” |
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Intrigued about how to work with and present big data? Sorin Adam Matei, Professor at the Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University, discusses his research on contributions to Wikipedia. |
SAGE Concept Grants We are seeking proposals for software tools that will tackle some of the challenges currently facing social scientists and enable more researchers to engage with computational methods. |
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A new form of crowdsourced political agents, triggered by gamification How a social media game can take an almost social bot-like nature and significantly boost the visibility of tweets by political leaders |
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