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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Ethics and scholarly research are inextricably linked. But it is not always obvious what ethical research means and how we go about ensuring that our studies are conducted and disseminated ethically. Alas, we don’t have signposts to follow, in a world where choices for researchers keep evolving. In this series of Methodspace posts, we’ll explore contemporary […]
Categories: Ethics, MentorSpace, Methods Type, Research, Social Issues, Uncategorised
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Governments seem to think that the only way to protect national security is to own as much data about the public as possible, but this is not the case. The push in Australia to create a national registry of driving licence photographs has been criticised for breaching privacy principles and creating data security risks. By […]
Categories: Big Data
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In 2016, a group of University of Melbourne researchers managed to decrypt some data that should have been anonymous. Using publicly available information, the team pulled service provider numbers out of a sample of Pharmaceutical Benefits and Medicare Benefits Schedule data published online by the Australian government. Needless to say, people were worried. But while […]
Categories: Editorial, Tools and Resources
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Imagine, if you can, a period long before today’s internet-based connectivity. Imagine that, in that distant time, the populations of every country were offered a new plan. The plan would involve linking up every space of social interaction, most sites of work, a large proportion of private moments of reflection, and a significant proportion of […]
Categories: Big Data, Editorial
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The past and future collided last year for the International Year of Statistics, when six professional organizations celebrated the multifaceted role of statistics in contemporary society to raise public awareness of statistics, and to promote thinking about the future of the discipline. The past came in the form of the 300th anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars […]
Categories: Big Data
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