In this Social Science Bites podcast, MIT’s Sandy Pentland tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about the origins of social physics in the barren days before the advent of widespread good data and solid statistical methods and how it blossomed as both a field and for Pentland’s own research.
How will social science research and teaching evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities big data creates? How can we bring down barriers to make this new computational social science accessible for all social researchers? That was the subject of a panel discussion at last month’s ESRC Festival of Social Sciences 2016.
SAGE Publishing surveyed social scientists around the world to learn more about who engages in research using ‘big data,’ and what challenges they face as well as the barriers facing those who are interested in conducting computational social science going forward.
A new survey shoots down the idea that early-career researchers aresomehow more likely to be digital natives and therefore more apt to conduct computational social science than those whose PhDs were issued more than a decade ago.
Political scientists Gary King has called on the policymakers and government officials in the audience to consider enacting a ‘treaty’ on the collection, retention, access and sharing of big data that could serve the needs of the academic world, the commercial world and government while protecting the interests of the public.
Mylynn Felt, author of a popular paper on social media and the social sciences, hopes to see a growing blend of established qualitative techniques with newly emerging big data research methods in future social science work.
Even if you say you don’t mind the government knowing what you do on social media, recent research suggests you tamp down your own opinions when reminded of the possibility of being found out.
Computers have revolutionized academic research – and at the same time created a new crop of problems. But, suggests Ben Marwick, computers can also help address some of the challenges they have created.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] Tom Burns, whose combination of play — and plays – with teaching in higher education added a light, collaborative and engaging model […] The creation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has led to a heated debate on the balance between peer review and evaluative metrics in research assessment regimes. Luciana Balboa, Elizabeth Gadd, Eva Mendez, Janne Pölönen, Karen Stroobants, Erzsebet Toth Cithra and the CoARA Steering Board address these arguments and state CoARA’s commitment to finding ways in which peer review and bibliometrics can be used together responsibly. “We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research. Title of course: Space/Power/Species What prompted the idea for the course? A few years ago, I came across the architect Joyce Hwang’s […]
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Impact
Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Tom Burns, 1959-2024: A Pioneer in Learning Development
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Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures
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Innovation
Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Our Open-Source Tool Allows AI-Assisted Qualitative Research at Scale
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This Anthropology Course Looks at Built Environment From Animal Perspective
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