What a year...Here are our top posts of 2020: From text mining tools in the social sciences to running online experiments and visualizing COVID-19 data
What a difference a year makes
This time last year the SAGE Ocean team had just wrapped up in-person events on gender equality in data science, observations on animation in data visualization, and the future of work. Like everyone else, we were looking forward to the Christmas break and excited about what 2020 had in store. Pandemics were reserved for Hollywood disaster movies and nobody had any idea what furlough meant. Fast forward to December 2020 and we haven’t held an in-person event since February 2020. The world has changed a lot in 12 months including how social and behavioral science research is conducted.
The SAGE Ocean Blog started the year off with a piece on our recently published white paper on software tools for social science. Next week we’ll publish a piece from senior product manager Daniela Duca on the challenges of running social science experiments from home and what tools can help. The move to online teaching, learning, and research feature heavily in our top posts of 2020. Back in April Katie Metzler wrote about the challenge COVID-19 to student research projects and in May, Jason Radford provided some helpful recommendations for translating studies into an online format and recruiting virtual participants.
We’ve also seen a significant spike in posts published before this year, most notably Jim Lumsden’s guest post from 2019 on how to run online experiments. Lumsden a Data Analyst at Prolific breaks down some of the tools and platforms that can help with a key stage of the online research process — creating your survey or experiment.