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.

In this guest blog, Alix Dumoulin and Regina Catipon cover how to embrace text analysis as a social scientist, the challenge cleaning text corpora brings in preprocessing, and introduce our upcoming tool, Texti, that will save researchers time.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about how higher education will be taught in the age of COVID-19. How should professors and instructors of qualitative methods courses re-think their curriculums for online classrooms or cohorts? How can students conduct observations if they’re sheltered at home? How will students work in teams to analyze data if they’re distributed across the world? Here are some tips for alternative data collection methods, and collaborative tools for remote analysis.

COVID-19 has affected research all over the world. With universities closing their campuses and governments issuing restrictions on social gatherings, behavioral research in the lab has ground to a halt. This situation is urgent. Ongoing studies have been disrupted and upcoming studies cannot begin until they are adapted to the new reality. At Volunteer Science, we’re helping researchers around the world navigate these changes. In this post, I’ll condense the most important recommendations we’re giving to researchers for translating their studies into an online format and recruiting virtual participants.

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. Read interviews with the winners to find out how their tools will benefit social research, and how the funding from SAGE will help them.

SAGE has announced the 2020 winners of its Concept Grant program, which provides funding for innovative software solutions that support social science research. In this blog we interview Andrew Lovett-Barron, the creator of the winning tool, Knowsi; a portal for researchers and participants to manage their consent relationship.

We will emerge from this pandemic with a better understanding of the world and an improved ability to teach others about it. For now, we need to be continuously analyzing the data and thinking about the lessons we can learn and apply. Here’s how you can join in!

At SAGE, we have been working with academics around improving and sharing teaching resources, especially for quantitative and computational methods in social sciences. Besides the mass remote and emergency teaching experiment happening right now, one of the positive things we can already identify and reuse to improve learning in methods courses is the glut of data visualizations. The absolute advantage here is that all these visualizations are produced (almost always) with the same raw input, telling a variety of different stories. What better way to explain the different uses and impact of visualizations and the use of different tools to students than examples based on the same data?

Text Wash uses machine learning and natural language processing to unlock previously untapped crime data, that so far has been inaccessible to research due to the need to anonymize the personally identifiable information it contains.

Now is the time for social scientists to take responsibility for guiding societal improvement.

Twenty-first-century societies are rapidly changing. We’re witnessing historic levels of partisan discord and institutional breakdown, and multiple simultaneous sea changes in norms around gender and ethnic identity, sexual expression, and the definitions of criminality. These political and cultural shifts, often amplified and accelerated through Internet platforms, are occurring alongside major economic upheavals, including the deaths and births of entire industries, renewed international trade wars, and inequality levels rivaling those of feudal times. Worse, there is no end in sight for these tumultuous trends. What are people to do? How are we to make sense of all this turmoil and find some working consensus about social reality (if not a social contract) allowing more of us to find a stable and comfortable way in the world?

At the end of last year, Dr. Daniela Duca (Product Manager for SAGE Ocean), hosted a webinar to discuss findings from our white paper on The Ecosystem of Technologies for Social Science Research. Daniela discussed who is developing research tools, who supports and funds them, the challenges they are facing and other trends from more than 400 tools in this space.

Text mining techniques have become critical for social scientists working with large scale social data, be it Twitter collections to track polarization, party documents to understand opinions and ideology, or news corpora to study the spread of misinformation. In the infographic shown in this blog, we identify more than 80 different apps, software packages, and libraries for R, Python and MATLAB that are used by social science researchers at different stages in their text analysis project. We focused almost entirely on statistical, quantitative and computational analysis of text, although some of these tools could be used to explore texts for qualitative purposes.

I’ve just got back from a fantastic workshop looking at infrastructure for research data discovery. I’ll blog about the workshop in due course, but I was asked to comment on Google Dataset Search (GDS). I had the chance to meet with Natasha Noy from Google who is behind the service. 

As with many Google services, it has been created by a small team, but with the underlying web-scale infrastructure of Google to build on top of. They look for data sets on the web that have been identified using Home - schema.org tags. Data repositories that expose these tags will get indexed by GDS (this includes both Figshare and DataDryad).

Our study, whose preliminary results we recently presented at the 2019 SISP (Italian Political Science Association) Conference, examines the visibility of the tweets posted by Italian political leaders during the last EU Elections campaign. We show how crowd-sourced and spontaneous political action, triggered by a social media game, can take an almost social bot-like nature and significantly boost the visibility of tweets by political leaders during a major political event.