‘From text to data - new ways of reading’ was a 2-day event organised by the National Library of Sweden, the National Archives and Swe-Clarin. The conference brought together librarians, digital collection curators, and scholars in digital humanities and computational social science to talk about the tools and challenges involved in large scale text collection and analysis.

The second annual Social Science Foo Camp took place at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park at the start of this month, convening an eclectic mix of more than 200 social scientists, technologists, funders, policy makers, businesspeople and writers.

We are excited to announce that the finalists for the NYU Coleridge Initiative’s Rich Context Competition have been selected. The competition challenged computer scientists to find ways of automating the discovery of research datasets, fields and methods behind social science research publications.  20 teams from 8 countries submitted letters of intent and four finalists have been chosen. We will be live webcasting the finalists’ presentations as well as the announcement of the winner on February 15.

Virtual Reality technology is opening previously locked doors to researchers in the social sciences. But how viable is it really as a research tool? We take a look back over the history of experimental research in human perception and response to consider the future of VR in experimental design.

It’s an exciting time to be in social science. Social media, digital identities and the world of big data has opened up new ways for social scientists to study and examine social phenomenon.

Some examples include using online search patterns to predict the spread of disease, tracking near real-time Twitter data to understand political movements or using location data to understand interpersonal interactions.

The move to a digital world has created a innovative new area of social science called computational social science (CSS).

Calling all social scientists. How were you trained? How are you keeping up (or not) with new developments in this rapidly changing digital world? How are you training your students?

This was the subject of an event sponsored by SAGE Ocean as part of the ESRC’s 2018 Festival of Social Science. In case you are not aware, Sage, who have been at the forefront of publishing qualitative work, have now launched SAGE Ocean – an initiative “to help social scientists to navigate vast datasets and work with new technologies”.

Last week, a mix of PhD students, early career and tenured researchers met in Cologne to discuss their latest projects around bias and discrimination on social media, and the algorithms underpinning many of the most pervasive services we use today.

Watch these short videos as leading academics present at this year’s inaugural Social Science Foo Camp discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by big data and the move to more computational methods.

While computers and instantaneous communications seem to have increased the complications of our daily lives, in the hands of researchers, these tools can move us toward a form of simplicity that furthers understanding of complex dynamics.