The digital age demands constant vigilance to combat threats that come along with technological advancements, and in that vein the U.S. Census Bureau is implementing a new disclosure avoidance system for data stewardship. Statistical safeguards — referred by the Census Bureau as “disclosure avoidance” — aim to prevent tracing personal information to a specific individual. […]
Categories: Big Data, Opportunities
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The term “big data” may bring to mind swaths of private information held by tech companies. But lots of big data is, in fact, visible to all – we just may not think of it as “data.” If you’ve been to the movies recently, you will have seen a dataset of credits – listing the […]
Categories: Big Data
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I swear by Hypatia, by Lovelace, by Turing, by Fisher (and/or Bayes), and by all the statisticians and data scientists, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgement, this oath and this indenture. Could this be the first line of a “Hippocratic Oath” for mathematicians and data scientists? […]
Categories: Big Data, Research Ethics
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The opioid crisis has dominated the U.S. news cycle for the past decade and in 2017 there were c. 50,000 opioid related deaths with no sign that the number of death will begin to decrease any time soon. Here Diana Almen helps interpret the data.
Categories: Big Data, Instruction
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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.
Categories: Big Data, Data Analysis
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Quantitative researchers, including those who work with Big Data, think creatively. This collection of open access articles might give you some food for thought about your own research.
Categories: Big Data, Creative Methods, Focus Series, Other
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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
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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, Instruction, Multimodal, Other, Presentation, Visuals, and Creativity, Qualitative, Quantitative, Teaching, Tools and Resources
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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
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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
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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
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