Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Visualizing Social Media Analysis
Two of the authors of case study on using Twitter for research describe the ethical challenges of working in a rapidly changing landscape, why it’s important to be able to visualize what your analysis is finding, and why it’s important not to let your analysis be derived from some sort of ‘black box’ that you as the researcher don’t fully understand.
What Trump’s Veep Choice Can Teach Us About Coalitions
A case study, drawn from Bob Graham’s new book, about how coalitions formed to reverse measures seen as anti gay — such as the religious freedom act that Mike Pence signed and then revised — is available for free here.
Introducing SocArXiv — an Open Archive for Social Science
Sociologist Philip Cohen of the University of Maryland introduces SocArxiv, a fast, free, open paper server to encourage wider open scholarship in the social sciences.
Multiplying Social Divisions: The Psychology of Us, Them and Rivalrous Cohesion Following the EU Referendum
As well as beginning the long and painful divorce with the European Union, Dominic Abrams and Giovanni A. Travaglino say about Brexit, the United Kingdom is also entering a social space with very different, and very worrying, future dominated by what they term ‘rivalrous cohesion.’
Vice Presidents: American Politics’ Vestigial Organ
While the choice of who will be Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidates currently consumes the American chattering class, once the choice is made the chosen are more likely than not to slide into obscurity.
A Post-Mortem: Social Sciences and Brexit
The UK’s referendum on remaining in the European Union or leaving it generated an avalanche of campaign information, including hundreds of interventions by social scientists. David Walker casts a sceptical eye over the experience, asking whether the wafer-thin majority for Leave signals a failure of social scientists input.
The Challenge of Regulating Research to Avoid Fraud
The more brazen the willingness to commit academic fraud, the harder it becomes to prevent, suggests Ian Freckelton. So while there is a role for codes of conduct or even criminal courts, finding ways to push temptation to deceive even further out of mind will likeley prove even more successful.
Use Qualitative Methods In Mining the Data Gold Rush
Mylynn Felt, author of a popular paper on social media and the social sciences, hopes to see a growing blend of established qualitative techniques with newly emerging big data research methods in future social science work.
