Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Social Science
1. Infrastructure Research to Support
Computational Social Science
Derek Hansen & Kevin Tew
Brigham Young University
2. Current Options for Researchers
Data Sources Code it Yourself
Computer Scientists
APIs
Scrapers
Use Corporate Tools
Software
Libraries
Use Free 3rd Party Tools
Social Scientists
3. Problems with Current Approach
• Non-coders have limited opportunities
• Corporate tools not designed for research needs and high cost
• Major duplication of effort
– Extra work for researchers
– More resource intensive for companies
• APIs not available, constantly changing, or rate limited
• Creating and maintaining 3rd party tools is hard
– Ongoing funding is challenging in a research environment
– Contribution not always recognized in academia
• Inconsistency in legal & ethical approaches
4. A Large-Scale Solution?
Enabling a Better Understanding of Continental-Scale Ecology
NEON is designed to gather and synthesize data on the impacts of climate
change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and
biodiversity… NEON will combine site-based data with remotely sensed data
and existing continental-scale data sets (e.g. satellite data) to provide a
range of scaled data products that can be used to describe changes in the
nation’s ecosystem through space and time.
Free and Publicly Accessible Resources
NEON’s open-access approach to its data and information products will
enable scientists, educators, planners, decision makers and the public to
map, understand and predict the effects of human activities on ecology and
effectively address critical ecological questions and issues.
7. Infrastructure Research
• Data Handling and Processing
– “Big Data” storage and analysis (e.g., scalable,
real-time)
– Customized programming language(s)
• Human-Computer Interaction
– Support usability and encourage high quality work
– Visualization
• Legal and Social
– Legal framework for companies & IRBs
– Community-building among researchers
8. Collaboration Opportunities
Center for the Advanced Study of
Communities and Information (CASCI)
2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies
(DSST) Summer Institute
Notes de l'éditeur
NEON is an example of a large-scale NSF-funded organization designed to help ecologists have the data and tools they need to enable higher quality research. Ecology has been notoriously bad at sharing data among researchers in the past, where most researchers collect small-scale datasets that often don’t aggregate well or get shared.
Datasift is an aggregator of data from social media sites that makes data available to companies via their own API.Researchers can pay for access to data from DataSift, though it can get expensive very quickly depending on the research questions and doesn’t collect many types of data that are important (e.g., many types of network data). The point of this slide is simply to show that the backend processing of big social data is not trivial and there are many interesting research questions tied to the actual infrastructure development that could be tackled while providing the tools necessary to support computational social science at a much larger scale.
This is the Query Builder put out by DataSift. A good example of a first attempt at making the creation of complex queries intuitive.