Sage Concept Grants: BigKnowledge
BigKnowledge is one of the 5 winners of the £2,000 Sage Concept Grant in 2023.
André Skupin and Sean C. Ahearn, Co-Founders, BigKnowledge
Social scientists today enjoy access to a myriad of data sources. These come in the form of unstructured text, imagery, audio, video, as well as semi-structured data accessed through web APIs, and traditional databases. By necessity, addressing corresponding challenges of data preparation, analysis, and sense-making has led to an ever-growing list of software tools. However, as the social science toolbox has swelled, it has become increasingly difficult to keep abreast of its contents, raising questions like:
Are researchers able to readily match tools to scientific questions?
Does a budding graduate student know whether a particular analytical goal warrants the development of a new tool or would this reinvent the proverbial wheel?
Does the knowledge ecosystem support easy crosswalks between software tools, academic publications, learning resources, and commercial innovation?
Our answer to these questions is to place social science tools in a domain-specific knowledge map that acts as a unifying canvas for tool descriptions, scientific papers, and other knowledge resources. Specifically, we will process metadata for 500+ social science tools, previously collected by Sage researchers, and perform integration into our BoKMap platform (U.S. Patent No. 11,650,073). In addition to the 2.1 million documents currently exposed by the platform, from tech articles to Wikipedia entries and patent filings, users will encounter a new source called SocSci Tools. It will then be possible to discover and explore social science tools via full text queries, point-and-click map queries, and crosswalks from other document sources.
Click here to learn more about the BoKMap platform or explore existing deployments, starting with these sample queries:
map query in “collective intelligence & social capital” and “privacy”
text query using the Sage Concept Grants 2023 application information
crosswalk from the Wikipedia entry on “Data Activism” to research papers
