Gary King makes all lectures for Quantitative Social Science Methods course free online
What is the field of statistical analysis? So begins Gary King’s first online course in the Harvard Government Dept graduate methods sequence. King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University -- one of 25 with Harvard's most distinguished faculty title -- and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science has just recorded all his lectures and made them free to access online. The videos range in length from 30 minutes to an hour and half and you can watch them all on YouTube here.
Researchers are awarded grants to study Facebook data and its influence on elections
Last year saw the launch of Social Science One—a model devised to allow academic researchers access to the huge amounts of data generated by private industry, including Facebook data which will constitute the inaugural project. This week the first grants have been announced in partnership with the Social Science Research Council. Twelve projects have been awarded grants, as over 60 researchers come together from 11 countries and 30 academic institutions to study social media’s impact upon our society and democratic systems.
Pre-conference on Politics & Computational Social Science 2018 - Roundup
Ahead of this year’s APSA general meeting, we attended the Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) pre-conference, hosted at Northeastern University. The event brought together political scientists working with large-scale data sets and emerging computational methods.
Humans broke the internet, understanding them better might help fix it
By Timo Hannay
Here's a multiple-choice question: Is the internet (a) the most open, egalitarian and empowering means of communication ever devised, or (b) a dystopian nightmare populated by hucksters, trolls and miscellaneous abusers of human rights? The answer is, of course, (c) all of the above and much else besides. This stark contrast between the internet's light and dark sides has become a defining characteristic of the digital age, but is not an inevitable consequence of the mostly innocuous technologies on which it's built. Rather, it is the product of their bewilderingly diverse and eccentric user base – otherwise known as humanity.
Gary King on big data analysis
In this Social Science Bite, Professor Gary King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis... King, spotlights the difference between computer scientists’ goals and social scientists’ goals, then talks about work examining social media and censorship in China.
Gary King: Do we need a big data treaty?
For years political scientist Gary King has argued and preached for a restructuring of the social sciences that would include “larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams” with big data analysis in their DNA. "The key reasons social sciences are moving from studying problems individually… to the scientific model where we’re actually solving problems, is because of the community. It is much easier to fool ourselves than it is to fool our community.” - Gary King