Answers to your questions about the researcher's position vis a vis the study.

What happens between the researcher's question or prompt, and the participant's answer? Read Sharon Ravitch's thoughtful post!

Transcribing can be a pain, and although recent progress in speech recognition software has helped, it remains a challenge. Speech recognition programs, do, however, raise ethical/consent issues: what if person-identifiable interview data is transcribed or read by someone who was not given the consent to do so? Furthermore, some conversational elements aren't transcribed well by pattern recognition programs. What, or who, is really transforming the transcription process, then? What's next for transcription?

Following the launch of the SAGE Ocean initiative in February 2018, the inaugural winners of the SAGE Concept Grant program were announced in March of the same year. As we build up to this year’s winner announcement we’ve caught up with the three winners from 2018 to see what they’ve been up to and how the seed funding has helped in the development of their tools.

In this post, we spoke with the Digital DNA Toolbox (DDNA) winners, Stefano Cresci and Maurizio Tesconi about their initial idea, the challengers they faced along the way and the future of tools for social science research.

Human social behavior has rapidly shifted to digital media services, whether Gmail for email, Skype for phone calls, Twitter and Facebook for micro-blogging, or WhatsApp and SMS for private messaging.  This digitalization of social life offers researchers an unprecedented world of data with which to study human life and social systems. However, accessing this data has become increasingly difficult.

Widely used apps like Facebook, Twitter or Google Maps count millions of users and are already deeply entrenched in our daily social life. However, while we know that mobile map applications are used quite often, we know very little about how they are used

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.