Media reports are a valuable source of crime data that can be used to supplement police and judicial records. Nechama Brodie explains the challenges and opportunities of working with this type of data, and introduces a new tool concept for the collection and analysis of homicide data.

New research and observations about academic careers and the Covid pandemic.

The latest edition of the SAGE Ocean newsletter shares tips and resources for moving your research online and making the shift to online teaching.

This blog by Sam Gilbert explains how internet search data is being used in responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and what search datasets and tools are available to researchers.

What does research impact mean for your career

With a third of the world’s population currently in some form of lockdown to control the spread of the coronavirus, the imperative to better understand the nature of the outbreak could not be greater. In the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, we are giving a shout-out to the response of the computational social science community.

As we all adjust to the new normal things can’t and won’t simply revert to a pre-COVID-19 world. Here in the UK we are only a few weeks into our new socially distant lives, blue Monday 2020 (January 18th) doesn’t somehow seem so depressing now. As Matt Reynolds of Wired has noted, ‘this is only the grim first act of the coronavirus crisis’. With this in mind, it is extremely important that we hear from experts right across the academic spectrum.

Research communities across the globe are tirelessly collecting, analyzing and sharing data to help us understand and tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s a collection of resources that visualize, map and demystify COVID-19 data.

Nesta launched the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design back in 2018 at an event jointly hosted by SAGE Publishing. The event featured talks, workshops and discussions exploring the development of collective intelligence as its own field, bridging the worlds of academia and industry together to create a new look domain. October 2019 saw the return of this one day event, jam packed with interactive sessions and an array of attendees from tech to the arts, data science to critical thinking and beyond.

The rise of music streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music, has contributed to an explosion of new forms of digital data about music consumption practices. As the digital platforms through which consumers access and engage with recorded music and creators distribute it, they are uniquely positioned to create immense volumes of data about what and how people consume music, individually and at scale. From data about what music people search for and skip, to demographic information about who is consuming what, music streaming platforms generate data about almost every micro-interaction with music, amassing enormous databases ripe for further value-extraction.

With intelligent machines increasingly playing a role in our daily lives, there is a need to involve the public in conversations around the social implications of new technologies. A new public-private initiative to involve citizens in understanding the social implications of AI could unite society under the banner of safeguarding core human values whilst improving AI literacy.