April 2020 big data & social research roundup

With a third of the world’s population currently in some form of lockdown to control the spread of the coronavirus, the imperative to better understand the nature of the outbreak could not be greater. In the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, we are giving a shout-out to the response of the computational social science community.

The quantity of COVID-19 news, some of it more reliable than others, can be overwhelming. We’ve put together a resource hub to help you navigate the numbers, browse maps and visualizations, and access tools to conduct your own data analysis. We’ve also included links to resources from SAGE Publishing for managing the transition to online teaching, as well as accessing and publishing research related to COVID-19.

In other news this month, we are hiring a SAGE Ocean Fellow to join us remotely from wherever you are staying safe from the virus, to work with us to develop a new automated text analysis tool for political science research. If you’re a grad student with a healthy (or unhealthy) enthusiasm for text mining, apply by 20th April.

Read on for all this plus our regular emerging tech updates and exciting news for Twitter researchers (spoiler alert - you’re good to go on the API).


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Got an item to include in the next newsletter? Email us at ocean@sagepub.com.

Sage News Resources for accessing and working with COVID-19 data
Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic

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.

More resources from SAGE

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.

Find links to resources in SAGE’s statement on COVID-19

Questions about teaching banner
Mapping and visualizing coronavirus data Cover

Blog: Mapping and visualizing coronavirus data

A list of visualization platforms, interactive COVID-19 maps, and visualization best practices.

Read the blog

Work with us!

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.

Apply now

Work with us!Banner
Twitter API Banner

Twitter API

Twitter now explicitly allows the use of its API in academic research, following an update and simplification of its developer policy.

Find out more

Events and deadlines

icon Status updates for 2020 social & behavioral sciences conferences: Cancellations, postponements, and moves to virtual events.
icon International Conference on ICT enhanced Social Sciences and Humanities 2020 in Amsterdam, Netherlands (June 29 - July 01).
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The 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) will take place as a virtual meeting.

Emerging tech
Facebook Icon SMILE

SMILE is an open source tool developed by Social Media Macroscope from the University of Illinois for collecting social media data and applying techniques like phrase mining, text classification, sentiment and network analysis.

 
Facebook Icon MonkeyLearn

MonkeyLearn is an easy to use platform for training algorithms that can classify your corpus or extract information from your documents, especially great if you are updating your corpus with new documents every day.

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How Will COVID-19 Impact Student Research Projects?