Grants Offered Computational Social Science Software Developers
A grant program that provides early stage funding for innovative software ideas that support social science researchers working with big data and new technology is now accepting applications.
The first Concept Grants from SAGE Ocean – an initiative from SAGE Publishing to support computational social science — were awarded in March. The three awardees were Quanteda Studio, which is working on an easy-to-use text analysis software tool; MiniVAN, which helps no specialist perform visual analysis; and Digital DNA Toolbox, which taps bioinformatics techniques to, among other things, assess the trustworthiness of online content. Each received $35,000 to develop their projects. (SAGE s the parent of Social Science Space.)
Applications for the 2019 Concept Grants will be taken until February 15, 2019. The grants again have a maximum value of $35,000 (or £25,000).
SAGE Ocean describes potential grants as supporting early stage software ideas, particularly those that include a plan for sustainability and/or that have future commercial potential within the academic market. Ideally projects will have wide-scale applicability within the social sciences.
Stefano Cresci, who with Maurizio Tesconi from the Institute for Informatics and Telematics at the Italian National Research Council developed Digital DNA, detailed the need for the Concept Grant concept. “We firmly believe that current problems related to the assessment of credibility and reliability of content (and content producers) require a multidisciplinary approach. To this end, this funding will contribute to bridge the gap between big data and social scientists, empowering the latter with state-of-the-art algorithms and analysis techniques that would otherwise be confined within the computer science community.”
To apply download an application by clicking here or on the image below.
If there is a potential opportunity that fits S3’s theme, we encourage you to send an email to Philip.patino@sagepub.com, so we can put it up as soon as possible.
