The age of Big Data has frequently been framed as a new frontier in human life, presenting both brand new opportunities and brand new challenges. In The Costs of Connection, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias articulate an alternative view: the quantified world in which we now live is a product of the continuation and expansion of both colonialism and capitalism: not a new frontier, but the inevitable expansion of an existing one.

On the 28th of August, we visited sunny Georgetown University to discuss all things politics and Computational Social Science for the second annual PaCSS conference. Here are our highlights.

AI is susceptible to misuse and has been found to reflect biases that exist in society. Fortunately, there are a number of organizations committed to addressing ethical questions in AI. We list our top 10.

In The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Margaret O’Mara provides a new account of the region’s evolution that brings the US government into the story. The book offers a compelling narrative that tracks the key players and events that have underpinned Silicon Valley’s tremendous, but messy, rise, writes Robyn Klingler-Vidra, while also underscoring the gender imbalance and casual misogyny that has been a longstanding characteristic of its culture.

In April this year a special collection examining social media and politics was published in SAGE Open. Guest edited by Joshua A. Tucker and Pablo Barberá, the articles grew out of a series of conferences held by NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation lab (SMaPP) and the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study (GIAS) known as SMaPP-Global. Upon publication Joshua Tucker said ‘the collection of articles also shows the value of exposing researchers from a variety of disciplines with similar substantive interests to each other's work at regular intervals’. Interdisciplinary collaborative research projects are a cornerstone of what makes computational social science such an interesting field. We were intrigued to know more so caught up with Josh and Pablo to hear more.

The baton was passed to the University of Amsterdam for the fifth addition of IC2S2 with the core conference taking place between 18-20 July.

Text is everywhere, and everything is text. More textual data than ever before are available to computational social scientists—be it in the form of digitized books, communication traces on social media platforms, or digital scientific articles. Researchers in academia and industry increasingly use text data to understand human behavior and to measure patterns in language. Techniques from natural language processing have created a fertile soil to perform these tasks and to make inferences based on text data on a large scale.

It’s all about incentives. The current academic ecosystem incentivises publication in high impact factor journals and grant capture above all else, but there is more to being an academic than producing journal articles and winning grants. Luckily there are an increasing number of initiatives that are helping academics get credit for more of the work they do and increase their broader impact. This post rounds up some of the most interesting efforts.

At CogX, the Festival of AI and Emergent Technology, two icons appeared over and over across the King’s Cross location. The first was the logo for the festival itself, an icon of a brain with lobes made up of wires. The second was for the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a partner of the festival. The SDG icon is a circle split into 17 differently colored segments, each representing one of the goals for 2030—aims like zero hunger and no poverty. The idea behind this partnership was to encourage participants of CogX—speakers, presenters, expo attendees—to think about how their products and innovations could be used to help achieve these SDGs.

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.