Tools & Technology Daniela Duca Tools & Technology Daniela Duca

Webinar recording and Q&A: Software tools in social science and humanities research

At the end of last year, Dr. Daniela Duca (Product Manager for SAGE Ocean), hosted a webinar to discuss findings from our white paper on The Ecosystem of Technologies for Social Science Research. Daniela discussed who is developing research tools, who supports and funds them, the challenges they are facing and other trends from more than 400 tools in this space.

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Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Chris Burnage Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Chris Burnage

From preprocessing to text analysis: 80 tools for mining unstructured data

Text mining techniques have become critical for social scientists working with large scale social data, be it Twitter collections to track polarization, party documents to understand opinions and ideology, or news corpora to study the spread of misinformation. In the infographic shown in this blog, we identify more than 80 different apps, software packages, and libraries for R, Python and MATLAB that are used by social science researchers at different stages in their text analysis project. We focused almost entirely on statistical, quantitative and computational analysis of text, although some of these tools could be used to explore texts for qualitative purposes.

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Tools & Technology Chris Burnage Tools & Technology Chris Burnage

Social scientists working with LinkedIn data

Today, researchers are using LinkedIn data in a variety of ways: to find and recruit participants for research and experiments (Using Facebook and LinkedIn to Recruit Nurses for an Online Survey), to analyze how the features of this network affect people’s behavior and identity or how data is used for hiring and recruiting purposes, or most often to enrich other data sources with publicly available information from selected LinkedIn profiles (Examining the Career Trajectories of Nonprofit Executive Leaders, The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning). 

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Tools & Technology, Methods Innovation Chris Burnage Tools & Technology, Methods Innovation Chris Burnage

Virtual reality headsets for testing and research

This blog post outlines what headsets you can use for our next event.

There are currently 3 types of hardware to access visually and audio-immersive experiences: headsets that connect to your PC, headgear that works with your mobile phone, and standalone devices. Besides varying in price, they also differ in their capabilities and hence are intended for different use cases.

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Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Heather Estop Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Heather Estop

Roundup: #text2data - new ways of reading

‘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.

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Diversity Equity & Inclusion Chris Burnage Diversity Equity & Inclusion Chris Burnage

50+ women to follow in computational social science

A little over a week ago, I posted a blog celebrating 39 women in computational social science. We knew there would be so many more amazing researchers to add, and the social science community duly delivered, suggesting plenty of women that should also be celebrated. Therefore, rather fittingly on #AdaLovelaceDay we have  published an updated list. The number has now more than doubled, and we hope that it is a good start for anyone looking for a supervisor for their PhD, or just wanting to see what other doctoral fellows are working on.

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