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?

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.

Collaboration is essential to the work of academic researchers and writers. Learn more from this selection of presentations.

Around the world, higher education faculty and students have been grappling with the mammoth task of flipping from face-to-face teaching to online learning, practically overnight. As teaching faculty scramble to figure out how to use Zoom for online learning and the debate continues as to whether universities should cancel exams or switch to home-based open book or open Google exams, it’s becoming clear that the impact of COVID-19 on academic research could be just as profound as the impact on teaching. In-person lab experiments, face-to-face interviews, focus groups, fieldwork and other data collection may be impossible for much of 2020. Where possible, researchers will switch modes from face-to-face to virtual or telephone data collection, and where that’s not possible or desirable for practical or methodological reasons, university research offices and funders are issuing guidance for academics who need to delay their data collection or fieldwork.

Now that more meetings are online using videoconferencing. This guest post by Lydia Hooper.

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.

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.

Dr, Ravitch reflects on listening and learning, and meanings for social research.

Sometimes scholarly articles offer practical advice. Find some in this collection!