Dr. Helen Kara offers a collection of open-access resources on research ethics.

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?

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.

Walk through an example using Dr. Salmons’ eight-step process for teaching with research cases.

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.

Simple but powerful, bar graphs are one of the most common charts used to compare categorical data, which are data that can be grouped into categories like race and sex. Here Diana gives some tips for making the perfect Bar graph.

Coming from a social science background, I have had very limited exposure to data science. I was therefore excited to learn about the emerging field of computational social science and the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) presented the right opportunity. I applied to the 2019 SICSS and I was accepted for the Cape Town partner site. I went in not knowing what to expect but by the end of the first day I knew the experience at the two-week Summer Institute was going to be truly worthwhile.

This summer we've had the pleasure of welcoming four Masters students from UK universities to work with the SAGE Ocean team. All four students have been quite incredible, and have managed to produce a variety of outputs and substantially contribute to our work. In this blog post, they share testimonials of their time in the team.

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.