There is a growing body of academic research looking at all aspects of emoji usage 😍🌴😀👍
If you have a mobile phone made in the last eight years, or if you've used social media, you're likely familiar with emoji. The colorful icons, first available in Japan in the 1990s, are ubiquitous and an increasingly common part of our online lives. They have all but replaced emoticons, their punctuation-based precursors, though kaomoji (more detailed emoticons, originating in Japan) such as ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ still enjoy popularity in some corners of the internet. Perhaps the most compelling example of emoji popularity was the "face with tears of joy" emoji 😂 being selected as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2015 - a fact you will find in the introduction of many academic papers on the topic.
Breaking through the disciplinary barrier with practical mapping
Steve Wallis and Bernadette Wright introduce mapping as a way to find connections across disciplines.
Cultivating Mentoring Digitally and Among Peers
Dr. Laura Pasquini offered a guest post about formal and informal online mentoring experiences in academic settings.
October 2019 Focus on Evaluation
In October 2019 we introduced a new topic focus on Evaluation, with Mentors-in-Residence to help us learn about it!
Gender equality in social data science. Get to know our panel and join us on 8th October
A week today sees the biggest SAGE Ocean event to date as we takeover the RocketSpace Theatre to bring you an exciting evening of drinks and discussions around diversity and gender equality in academia and in particularly, social data science. Sorry to all those people scattered further afield in the UK who can’t make it to London but fear not, we will be filming the event and the recording should be available later in the year.
Open Access Ethics Resources for Researchers
Dr. Helen Kara offers a collection of open-access resources on research ethics.
The ethics of AI and working with data at scale: what are the experts saying
If we were to do a text mining exercise on all the incredible discussions at last week’s conference 100+ Brilliant Women in AI & Ethics, education would beat all other topics by a mile. We talked about educating kids, we had teenagers share their thoughts on AI in poems and essays, and exchanged views on the nuances of teaching ethics in computing and working with large volumes of social data both for computer scientists and experts from other disciplines.
The Tedium of Transcription: Who's Codifying the Process?
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?
Interview with Dr. Kathy Roulston
Dr. Roulston is the author of Reflective Interviewing: A Guide to Theory and Practice, and blogs at Qual Page. When I saw her resources about teaching methods, I reached out to her and asked for an interview. I am happy to introduce her work to MethodSpace readers!
Euro CSS 2019: European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science
The 2nd-4th September 2019 marked the third in a series of symposia on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science (Euro CSS). Computer scientists, political scientists, sociologists, physicists, mathematicians and psychologists from 24 countries gathered in Zurich for a day of workshops and tutorials followed by a two-day one track conference.
Who’s disrupting transcription in academia?
Transcribing is a pain, recent progress in speech recognition software has helped, but it is still a challenge. Furthermore, how can you be sure that your person-identifiable interview data is not going to be listened and transcribed by someone who wasn’t on your consensus forms. The bigger disruptor is the ability to annotate video and audio files
Politics and Computational Social Science 2019 Round-Up
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.
Teaching Methods with Research Cases
Walk through an example using Dr. Salmons’ eight-step process for teaching with research cases.
10 organizations leading the way in ethical AI
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.
Book review: The code: Silicon Valley and the remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara
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.
Teach Methods Across the Curriculum: Interviews and the Classroom
Help your students develop research skills, even when you are not teaching research classes.
About Data Visualizations: Bar Graphs
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.