Social Science Space

The current convention that envisions the manuscript as a self-contained universe produces a range of negative consequences extending beyond papers’ obscene length: many scholars seem to cite papers based on their abstracts or even title alone; reviewing literature takes lots of time; noncore research communities are badly served; new requirements on research transparency and openness are difficult to meet; and, finally, our papers are not particularly enjoyable to read.

While the built environment is an important sector globally, it is notoriously one of two sectors with low digitization.

“Sensing,” the authors have written, “is indispensable for constructing knowledge and should be employed on par with the intellect, particularly in today’s complex and uncertain context. Yet, we have observed learners’ reluctance to engage with sensing and attempted to understand the reasons for it.”

According to NIST’s Reva Schwartz, bias manifests itself not only in artificial intelligence algorithms and the data used to train them, but also in the societal context in which AI systems are used. 

The quick pace of change and the establishment of new industry actors inspired the authors to ask: what is driving service innovation and digitalization in the Swedish music market and how can we understand service in this context?

In his new book, Richard Heller proposes a model he calls the distributed university – that is, a university that distributes education online to where it is needed.

By focusing on researchers, rather than research, Paul Nightingale and Rebecca Vine suggest research systems would be better positioned to appreciate the multifaceted ways in which fields of research, such as the social sciences, impact society.

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced the potential and risks of linked real word datasets to accelerate and produce new improvements in public health. In this post, the authors outline the opportunities and challenges of using real world data as part of the ‘Unlocking data to inform public health policy and practice’ project.

The principal investigator of an experiment to see how well academic videos can help students understand journal articles suggests the answer is yes, it can help a lot.

The Association for Psychological Science Global Collaboration on COVID-19 brought experts together to assess how their field has contributed to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and identify possibilities for new research to answer unanswered questions.

David Canter follows his concern that psychologists are losing contact with people by considering how computers are presented as replacements for human ‘intelligence’. This ignores the importance of in situ person to person contact, which has been shown by the COVID pandemic to be so crucial for people.

Mark Carrigan reflects on how research listening has shaped his own practice and how an implicit assumption of its secondary relationship to reading, may limit our appreciation of engaging with research in a multi-modal fashion.