Text Wash, a new software tool that anonymizes personally identifiable text data, making it accessible to social scientists without compromising its usability for research, has just won the SAGE Concept Grant. This year’s award comes to roughly $30,000. Text Wash is being developed by Bennett Kleinberg, Maximilian Mozes and Toby Davies from the Department of […]
Categories: Big Data
Continue Reading
A MethodSpace focus for May is about ways to use visuals to represent key ideas, themes in the data, and results of the study, in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research and evaluation. Find all posts in this unfolding series. Let’s start thinking about visualization. The term “data visualization” is commonly used to describe the […]
Categories: Big Data, Creative Methods, Evaluation, Focus Series, Multimodal, Qualitative, Quantitative, Students, Teaching, Tools and Resources, Uncategorised, Visuals
Continue Reading
Baseball is back, and fans can anticipate another season of amazing catches, overpowering pitching, tape-measure home runs – and, yes, controversial calls that lead to blow-ups between umpires and players. Home plate umpires are at the heart of baseball; every single pitch can require a judgment call. Yet ask any fan or player, and they’ll […]
Categories: Big Data, Qualitative, Quantitative
Continue Reading
Your brain is made up of billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. And how they’re arranged gives rise to the brain’s functionality and to your personality. That’s why scientists in Switzerland recently produced the first-ever digital 3D brain cell atlas, a complete mapping of the brain of a mouse. While this is a […]
Categories: Big Data
Continue Reading
Facebook, Instagram and other platforms recently set their users a 10 year challenge: post your first ever Facebook photo and another one of you today. Whilst some users were quick to comply, others responded in unexpected ways. Some reactions were funny: Jennifer Aniston in 2009 is Iggy Pop in 2019. Some had a political message: an […]
Categories: Big Data, Data Collection, Research
Continue ReadingThis month’s big data newsletter includes several top-flight free resources for readers, including an article on “The social imaginaries of data activism” drawn from the journal Big Data & Society; a chapter from The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods that asks, “Big Data – Hype or Revolution?”; and a chapter from another of […]
Categories: Big Data, Quantitative
Continue Reading
The U.S. government shutdown may be over – for now – but its consequences will linger on. One of those concerns is the dizzying amount of economic data the federal government collects on everything from the state of the economy and investment to the cost of college and the quality of nursing homes. During the […]
Categories: Big Data, Editorial
Continue Reading
There’s an increasing concern among scholars that, in many areas of science, famous published results tend to be impossible to reproduce. This crisis can be severe. For example, in 2011, Bayer HealthCare reviewed 67 in-house projects and found that they could replicate less than 25 percent. Furthermore, over two-thirds of the projects had major inconsistencies. […]
Categories: Big Data, Editorial
Continue Reading
I recently got jazzed about two findings coming out of the world of computational social science, primarily because they hit so close to my home (hello, junior faculty feeling the pressure to produce): Dashun Wang looked at the career trajectories of 30,000 artists across multiple types of field: art, film, and science. He found that […]
Categories: Big Data, Editorial, Mixed
Continue ReadingTwo must-read blog posts and a report on the latest SAGE Ocean speaker series event are key draws in the latest big data newsletter, viewable below. The blog posts include “The Computation/Context Trade-Off?” by Laura K. Nelson, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University, and “Learning data science from a […]
Categories: Big Data, SAGE Posts
Continue Reading
