Online Posts and Media

In the lead up to International Women’s Day on Friday March 8th, SAGE Ocean posed a series of questions to leading academics. In this post I explores how we nurture an academic landscape that is more accessible to women.

In this blog post I explore a fundamental question in computational social science: does “big computation” necessarily comes at the expense of narrative richness, contextual detail, and theory? Or, conversely, narrative richness can only happen without computation?

Rather than simply calling for diversity within the field of data analytics on terms dictated by this “new ‘Old Boy Network’ of Ivy Leaguers,” we should instead make big data, and data analytics, work on our own terms. I believe we can develop a data analytics that helps us touch, smell, and feel the game (and the social world).

To give a taste of my research agenda I highlight below a few of my findings and methods, ending with hopes for future research along these lines.

Data come in all shapes and sizes, but in the past ten years we have seen huge leaps in the amount of data readily available in the form of unstructured or semi-structured text. This presents both opportunities and challenges for social science researchers, including social movements scholars.

In this blog post I address two common critiques of computational text analysis, as they are articulated by Andrew Perrin, in his review of the Poetics special issue on topic modelling.