SAGE Concept Grants: Interviews with our £2,000 winners
The SAGE Concept Grants form an integral part of our mission at SAGE Ocean to support the use of computational methods and big data in social science research. Since 2018, the Concept Grants have supported the development of innovative software tools that enable researchers to engage with digital methods and gain new insights from data.
In 2020, we introduced five new grants of £2,000 for software tools in the earlier stages of development, to enable concept testing and software development. We spoke to each of our five winners about how their tools will benefit social research, and how the funding from SAGE will help them.
Measuring experience in VR
A tool to help researchers measure participants’ behavioral responses in virtual reality.
Brenda Groen and Ruth Pijls
What is your motivation for building the VR measurement tool?
Experimental research using VR is promising because it enables a realistic environment which can be designed and controlled by the researcher. However, we are not yet able to measure a person’s experience real-time in VR. Software for asking, answering and registering questions during the VR experience would make it possible to examine the effects of environmental aspects on people’s experience in real-time, improving the reliability and validity of the research.
How will the SAGE Concept Grant help you?
We have already created a virtual environment of a reception area to investigate the influence of the environment on people’s customer service experience. The SAGE Concept Grant enables us to expand the existing tool to develop a prototype VR application for measuring real-time experience and behavioral responses in a realistic and controllable environment.
Oolong
A set of standards and benchmarks that will enable researchers to test the validity of their content analysis models.
Chung-hong Chan
What is your motivation for building Oolong?
There’s a validity problem with using off-the-shelf text analytic tools: Sentiment tools are often developed for specific contexts, and therefore, they must be revalidated before using them in your own study. However, many papers that use these tools are published without such revalidation and thus are probably invalid.
Prominent researchers have advocated for revalidation for years but the question of how to do it remains unanswered, and there is currently no standard in place. Oolong aims to provide simple and standardized tests for frequently used text analytic tools.
What impact will Oolong have on social science research?
All social scientists who use text analytic tools will benefit from using Oolong. Revalidation will afford us greater confidence in the tools we are using. Oolong is here to prove that revalidation can be easy and fun!
Touch Capture Pro
An app for researchers to study how people interact with touch-based devices.
Stoo Sepp
How will Touch Capture Pro benefit social science researchers?
Touch Capture Pro was developed to record high fidelity data on touch interactions with an iPad device. My hope is that with tools like this, social science researchers will be able to investigate the effects of using technologies like smartphones and tablets more easily. It will enable researchers to conduct large scale studies in natural environments, which could contribute to our understanding of the human motor system and its role in cognition.
How will the SAGE Concept Grant help you?
This award will help me to expand the functionality of the app and bring it to the Apple App Store, allowing social science researchers to present stimuli or learning materials to participants, and collect data on their interactions with the chosen materials. It streamlines the research process by providing an alternative to traditional methods such as observation and video recording.
Homicide Media Tracker
A platform for tracking news media archives for the study of violence in society and the media’s role in shaping public opinion.
Nechama Brodie
What was your motivation for building the Homicide Media Tracker?
Media data about crime can be extremely useful for social research - but only if you know how to collect, curate and interrogate it. When I built a femicide-media database for my PhD I had to annotate and compile everything manually. It took me five years to gather data on over 400 murders linked to 3,200 articles. I knew that with the right tools, I could scale up my research to cover more homicide types reported in media, over a greater time period.
How will your tool benefit social science research?
The Homicide Media Tracker will support expanded mixed-method, qualitative and quantitative studies of media and violence in society, using digitised and heterogenous news media archives. This simple platform will enable researchers to build and share rich databases of media content, creating detailed profiles of violent crime over time. More robust data will enable stronger studies and encourage participation with other social science disciplines.
Exploratory Labeling Assistant (ELA)
A tool for visually exploring, labeling and classifying large text corpora.
Enrico Bertini
What was your motivation for building ELA?
I wanted to help people label large data sets while feeling in control of the process. Automated methods based exclusively on machine provide few opportunities for the end user to steer the process and express what they are interested in. ELA is an attempt to create a more human-computer cooperation solution that integrates machine recommendations and interactive steering of the labeling process.
The support from SAGE will help me connect with people with expertise in commercializing software products and to reach out to potential users.
Who will benefit from using ELA?
Anyone who has a large document collection and wants to organize it around a set of categories that need to be discovered and refined. This includes people working with opinion data, social media, cyber crime data and much more.
Congratulations to all our winners! Stay tuned to the SAGE Ocean blog for updates from the winners and their tools over the coming months.
To learn more about the winner of our £15,000 grant, click here to read an interview with Andrew Lovett-Barron, creator of Knowsi.