In 2015-2016, the Workshop in Methods was directed by Stephen Benard, working in collaboration with the Social Science Research Commons. Browse workshops from the 2015-2016 academic year below. All 2015-2016 workshop videos have also been compiled in a playlist on Media Collections Online. You may also browse videos from all years in the full Workshop in Methods collection on Media Collections Online, and access other materials, such as presentation slides, through the Workshop in Methods collection on IUScholarWorks.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Reproducible Results and the Workflow of Data Analysis
Dr. J. Scott Long
2-3:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Many disciplines are paying increasing attention to "reproducible results". This is the idea other scientists should have access to your data so that they can reproduce the results from your published work. Producing reproducible results is critically important and highly dependent on your workflow of data analysis. This workflow encompasses the entire process of scientific research: Planning, documenting, and organizing your work; creating, labeling, naming, and verifying variables; performing and presenting statistical analyses; preserving your work; and (perhaps, most important) producing replicable results. Most of our work in statistics classes focuses on estimating and interpreting models. In most “real world” research projects, these activities involve less than 10% of the total work. Professor Long’s talk is about the other 90% of the work. An efficient workflow saves time, introduces greater reliability into the steps of the analysis, and generates reproducible results.
Dr. Long is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Indiana University.
Materials available by email (event flyer)
Friday, September 4, 2015
Using jsPsych to conduct behavioral research online
Josh de Leeuw
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Behavioral scientists have been using the internet to conduct research for over two decades, but only recently has the scope of internet research begun to rival the traditional laboratory experiment. In this workshop, I will introduce you to the basics of online data collection and various tools for conducting online research, including jsPsych (http://www.jspsych.org), a programming library for conducting laboratory-like experiments online developed at Indiana University. I'll describe all the necessary components of running an online experiment, the features of jsPsych, and how to create a simple experiment using the jsPsych library.
Josh de Leeuw is a doctoral student in the Cognitive Science program and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. His research interests include the role of cognitive constraints in learning, interactions between knowledge and perception, and the methodology of online behavioral experiments. He is the creator of jspsych, a popular tool for conducting online experiments. His most recent project is FactorsDB, a community-driven collection of open-source online experiments for use in the classroom. He received his BA in Cognitive Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, demonstration materials)
Video (Media Collections Online)
Friday, September 11, 2015
Doing Ethnographic Research in the Real World: Methodological Reflections and Practical Advice
Dr. Annette Lareau
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Qualitative studies, including participant-observation and in-depth interviews, offer valuable opportunities to understand how social life works. These methods also focus on the meaning of events. Still, there are important challenges in the development of such studies. For example, the focus of the study only unfolds over time, yet numerous institutional practices require researchers to offer clear and confident explications of the purpose of the research in the early stages. This talk discusses the realistic challenges of doing ethnographic work including ethnographic studies of family life. In addition to offering a reflection on enduring challenges, the talk discusses issues of quality and rigor in ethnographic work.
Annette Lareau is the Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Materials available by email (event flyer)
Friday, September 18, 2015
Introduction to Human Subjects and KC IRB at IU
Adam Mills
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This workshop will provide an overview of human subjects research and submitting an application through the KC IRB system. Representatives from IU Human Subject Office will provide a brief introduction to human subjects research, then focus the remaining time on learning how to navigate the IU IRB process.
Adam Mills is a Compliance Associate with the IU Human Subjects Office.
Materials available by email (event flyer, presentation slides)
Friday, October 16, 2015
Probabilistic Topic Models and User Behavior
Dr. David Blei
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Probabilistic topic models provide a suite of tools for analyzing large document collections. Topic modeling algorithms discover the latent themes that underlie the documents and identify how each document exhibits those themes. Topic modeling can be used to help explore, summarize, and form predictions about documents. Topic modeling ideas have been adapted to many domains, including images, music, networks, genomics, and neuroscience.
Traditional topic modeling algorithms analyze a document collection and estimate its latent thematic structure. However, many collections contain an additional type of data: how people use the documents. For example, readers click on articles in a newspaper website, scientists place articles in their personal libraries, and lawmakers vote on a collection of bills. Behavior data is essential both for making predictions about users (such as for a recommendation system) and for understanding how a collection and its users are organized.
In this talk, I will review the basics of topic modeling and describe our recent research on collaborative topic models, models that simultaneously analyze a collection of texts and its corresponding user behavior. We studied collaborative topic models on 80,000 scientists' libraries from Mendeley and 100,000 users' click data from the arXiv. Collaborative topic models enable interpretable recommendation systems, capturing scientists' preferences and pointing them to articles of interest. Further, these models can organize the articles according to the discovered patterns of readership. For example, we can identify articles that are important within a field and articles that transcend disciplinary boundaries.
More broadly, topic modeling is a case study in the large field of applied probabilistic modeling. Finally, I will survey some recent advances in this field. I will show how modern probabilistic modeling gives data scientists a rich language for expressing statistical assumptions and scalable algorithms for uncovering hidden patterns in massive data.
David Blei is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at Columbia University. His research is in statistical machine learning, involving probabilistic topic models, Bayesian nonparametric methods, and approximate posterior inference. He works on a variety of applications, including text, images, music, social networks, user behavior, and scientific data.
David earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Brown University (1997) and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley (2004). Before arriving to Columbia, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He has received several awards for his research, including a Sloan Fellowship (2010), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2011), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011), Blavatnik Faculty Award (2013), and ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2013).
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Video (Media Collections Online)
Friday, October 23, 2015
Introduction to R
Jefferson Davis
2-3:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
R is a flexible free software language for statistical computing and visualizations. Its popularity is increasing across a broad range of disciplines. This workshop will provide and introduction to using R including
- Downloading R and where to find R on IU computers
- Basic R syntax
- The Rstudio environment
- Creating and importing data
- Producing and editing graphs
- Using statistical techniques such as t-tests and linear regressions.
The workshop will consist of a one-hour introductory lecture followed by sample hands-on exercises in R. No prior knowledge of R is assumed.
Jefferson Davis is a software consultant with Research Analytics. He has worked on several projects that have used R and R libraries—most recently visualizing mid-20th century demographic data and running semantic analyses on large text files.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, R code)
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Your Statistical Tool Belt
Stephanie Dickinson
4-5:15pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This introductory workshop will give an overview of how to identify what types of data analysis tools to use for a project, along with basic “DIY” instructions. We will discuss the most common analysis tools for describing your data and performing significance tests (ANOVA, Regression, Correlation, Chi-square, etc), and how they should be selected based on the type of data and the type of research question you have. This is geared towards students or faculty beginning their foray into quantitative analysis of research data, or those who have been around but would like to step back and get a framework for how to navigate basic statistical methods.
Stephanie Dickinson is a Senior Statistical Consultant with the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, handout, hands-on exercise files)
Friday, October 30, 2015
Writing Better R Code
Hui Zhang
2-3:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This workshop provides intermediate users with an overview of intermediate and advanced techniques for programming using R. The workshop will emphasize well known approaches for improving the performance of R codes. Some previous knowledge of R is recommended since the course will not go into specific details of R syntax. Some familiarity with C/C++ is also recommended.
Topics will include:
- Improving Loops' Performance in R
- Using Plys
- Vectorization
- Rcpp
Hui Zhang is a research software engineer with Research Analytics. He has worked on several projects that have used R and R libraries in the NSF funded Stampede project.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, R code)
Friday, November 6, 2015
Social Media Mining with Natural Language Processing
Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Dr. Markus Dickinson
2:30-4:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200) time change
With the increasing role social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumbler play in our lives today, the body of data generated by their users continues to grow phenomenally. Accordingly, searches and processing of social media data beyond the limiting level of surface words are becoming increasingly important to business and governmental bodies, as well as to lay web users. Detection of sentiment, emotion, deception, gender, sarcasm, age, perspective, topic, community, and personality are all valuable social meaning components that promise to be important elements of next generation search engines and web intelligence. The emerging area of extracting social meaning from social media data using computational methods is known as Social Media Mining (SMM).
This workshop is intended to first introduce the core ideas of natural language processing (NLP) and then to provide the ideas and some hands-on instruction in mining social data using NLP and machine learning technologies. As such, we will address practical issues related to building tools to mine social media data and some of the primary computational methods employed for modeling social meaning as occurring in these data.
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. Muhammad's interests are at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and social media. He is especially interested in creating more 'social' machines.
Markus Dickinson is an Associate Professor of Linguistics. Part of his research focuses on the intersection of linguistic annotation and natural language processing and the other part focuses on the automatic analysis of second language learner data.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Video (Media Collections Online)
Friday, November 13, 2015
Introduction to Qualtrics Survey Software
Heather Terhune Marti
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Qualtrics (qualtrics.com) is a software package for collecting survey data that has been widely adopted by leading research universities and major corporations. Many IU departments and centers are currently using Qualtrics, with more and more purchasing licenses each year. This group of licensees led by a team at UITS negotiated IU’s first enterprise-wide license for Qualtrics last year. This speaks to the broad appeal of Qualtrics and the software’s flexibility of use.
This hands-on workshop will provide an overview of Qualtrics for use in creating and distributing online (web) surveys according to best practices. You will learn how to create an online survey from scratch, including how to format various types of questions and implement skip logic. You will also learn how to import your list of survey recipients, create an email invitation message, send the survey to recipients, and export your collected survey data. Time permitting, we will cover higher-end customizations and complex survey skip path methods. While we will focus on web survey examples, the skills that you will learn in this workshop can also be used to develop interview guides, data entry forms, and lab experiments in Qualtrics – you will learn that the tool is a versatile one!
Heather Terhune Marti is a Study Director at the IU Center for Survey Research. She has 20+ years of survey research experience and has directed 75+ research studies for the Center. She has six years of experience using Qualtrics and has programmed or provided consultation on more than 30 studies.
Please note: in order to participate in the hands-on portions of this workshop, you will need a Qualtrics account. If you do not yet have an account and are a member of the College of Arts and Sciences, please request an account by emailing ssrccq@indiana.edu from your IU email account with your full name and department. If you are a member of another school or organization, contact your Qualtrics division. If your school or department is not listed, please email ssrccq@indiana.edu for more information.
Materials available by email (event flyer, hands-on exercise files)
Friday, December 11, 2015 date change
The Ethics of Naming and the Perils of Masking in Ethnography
Dr. Colin Jerolmack
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Ethnographers routinely employ pseudonyms and even mask the sites (e.g., street corner, neighborhood, city) of their research. This is usually justified as an ethical necessity, to protect our participants. In this talk, drawing from a paper I am co-authoring with Alexandra Murphy (Michigan), I challenge this justification and spell out some of the ways that masking can potentially harm research participants and impede social science research. Regarding ethics, I show, on the one hand, how masking often fails to provide the guaranteed degree of identity protection and, on the other hand, how research participants may have a very different understanding of what the researcher owes them that has little to do with whether or not they are named (e.g., portraying them as a human, not just a social type). Regarding scientific integrity, I argue that masking reifies ethnographic authority, invokes a pseudo-generalizability that downplays the particularities of the case (e.g., "Middletown"), and inhibits replicability (or "revisits"), falsifiability, or comparison. I conclude by arguing that masking is a convention, not an ethical or IRB necessity, and while I concede that there are many cases in which masking is the ethical choice, I contend that we should no longer consider it the default option.
Colin Jerolmack is an associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU. He is currently writing a book about how shale gas extraction ("fracking") impacts rural community life.
Spring 2016
Friday, January 15, 2016
Introduction to Human Subjects and KC IRB at IU
Sara Benken (with Adam Mills and Andrew Neel)
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This workshop will provide an overview of human subjects research and submitting an application through the KC IRB system. Representatives from the IU Human Subjects Office will provide a brief introduction to human subjects research, then focus the remaining time on learning how to navigate the IU IRB process.
Sara Benken is an Associate Director in the IU Human Subjects Office.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Video (Media Collections Online)
Friday, January 22, 2016
Reproducible Results and the Workflow of Data Analysis
Dr. J. Scott Long
2:30-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Many disciplines are paying increasing attention to "reproducible results". This is the idea other scientists should have access to your data so that they can reproduce the results from your published work. Producing reproducible results is critically important and highly dependent on your workflow of data analysis. This workflow encompasses the entire process of scientific research: Planning, documenting, and organizing your work; creating, labeling, naming, and verifying variables; performing and presenting statistical analyses; preserving your work; and (perhaps, most important) producing replicable results. Most of our work in statistics classes focuses on estimating and interpreting models. In most “real world” research projects, these activities involve less than 10% of the total work. Professor Long’s talk is about the other 90% of the work. An efficient workflow saves time, introduces greater reliability into the steps of the analysis, and generates reproducible results.
Dr. Long is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Indiana University.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Friday, January 29, 2016
Introducing graphical access to IU's supercomputers with Karst Desktop Beta
Abhinav Thota
2-3:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Supercomputers are designed to use a command line interface and batch processing system. This means users accustomed to modern graphical interfaces must overcome a steep learning curve when switching to supercomputers. Learn how UITS Research Technologies is tackling this problem using a new graphical interface for the Karst supercomputer. Participants will have the opportunity to test the service after the presentation on their laptop/desktop devices.
Abhinav Thota is a Principal Engineer in the Research Technologies division of UITS/PTI. He is part of the Scientific Applications and Performance Tuning (SciAPT) team and helps users efficiently use HPC resources at IU.
If you would like to try Karst Desktop Beta during the workshop and do not already have a Karst account, visit Create Additional Accounts in One.IU to request one before the workshop. Additional information about creating computing accounts at IU is available on the Knowledge Base.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Friday, February 5, 2016
Introduction to Web Scraping with Python
NaLette Brodnax
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Web scraping is a method of extracting and restructuring information from web pages. This workshop will introduce basic techniques for web scraping using popular open-source tools. The first part of the workshop will provide an overview of basic HTML elements and Python tools for developing a custom web scraper. The second part will enable participants to practice accessing websites, parsing information, and storing data in a CSV file. This workshop is intended for social scientists who are new to web scraping. No programming experience is required, but basic familiarity with HTML and Python is helpful.
NaLette Brodnax is a data scientist and fourth-year doctoral student in the Joint Public Policy program administered by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. Her research interests include education policy, policy analysis and program evaluation, and quantitative research methodology. As a graduate assistant for the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology, she is working on a number of projects intended to expose women to technology and to support women using technology in their studies and careers. Prior to entering the doctoral program, NaLette spent nine years in corporate finance roles, managing large data sets and developing financial models for large companies such as Abbott Laboratories and Nokia. She holds a BSBA from The Ohio State University with a concentration in Finance and a Master's in Public Policy from Loyola University Chicago.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, handouts)
Friday, February 12, 2016
Watching Closely: Reflections on the Methods of Direct Observation
Dr. Christena Nippert-Eng
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Ethnographers rely on three related activities to conduct research in the field: observation, conversation, and participation. Observing others in their environments and using this data to inform and share conclusions is an essential part of any fieldworker's toolkit. Of these three activities, ethnographers' observational muscles tend to be their weakest.
In this talk, Christena Nippert-Eng offers her own contribution to the strengthening of direct observation research based on her recent book, Watching Closely: A Guide to Ethnographic Observation (Oxford, Nov 2015). The book includes nine exercises for practicing observational skills, including a preparatory briefing and post-exercise discussion. A companion website includes sample responses to each exercise from previous students, who practiced by observing Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo gorillas.
Nippert-Eng hopes to encourage the use of more creative ways of collecting and analyzing data, such as sketching, diagramming, and photography, while helping fieldworkers develop more concrete expectations for the potential uses and meanings of ethnographic data. The goal is for ethnographers to not only strengthen their core skills, mindset, and creativity, but also to produce research that is more scientifically rigorous and persuasive.
Workshop attendees will get a sneak peek at Nippert-Eng’s next book as well, Gorillas Up Close (Henry Holt, April 2016). This is an ethnographic picture book on the daily lives and design needs of captive western lowland gorillas, written for middle grade readers and up. The book was produced in collaboration with former design, architecture, and social science students from the observation methods course on which Watching Closely is based, in part to demonstrate the potential value of direct observation methods.
Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D.is a sociologist and Professor of Informatics. She joined IUB this year. Her scholarly interests include cognitive and formal sociology, everyday life, culture, technology, design, ethnography, and the western lowland gorillas of Lincoln Park Zoo.Dr. Nippert-Eng’s work has been featured extensively in the media, including radio, television and newspaper interviews ranging from NPR's "Talk of the Nation" to programs on PBS and MSNBC and stories for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Working Mother and Fast Company. She has served as a consultant to a number of companies including HP, Motorola, Gillette, Steelcase, and Hilton Hotels as well as a variety of nonprofits and design consultancies.Professor Nippert-Eng’s published books include Home and Work: Boundary Work in Everyday Life (1996 University of Chicago Press), Islands of Privacy: Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life (2010 University of Chicago Press) and Watching Closely: A Guide to Ethnographic Observation (2015 Oxford University Press).
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Estimating Treatment Effects using Stata
Dr. David Drukker
2-5pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This talk reviews treatment-effect estimation with observational data and discusses Stata examples that illustrate syntax and parameter interpretation. After reviewing the potential-outcome framework, the talk discusses estimators for the average treatment effect (ATE) that require exogenous treatment assignment and some estimators that allow for endogenous treatment assignment. The talk also discusses checks for balance, checks for overlap, and some estimators for the ATE from survival-time data. Finally, the talk discusses estimating and interpreting quantile treatments effects.
David M. Drukker (Executive Director of Econometrics) has been with Stata since he finished his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin over 15 years ago. He has developed many Stata commands for analyzing panel data, time-series data, and cross-sectional data. He played a key role in the initial development of Stata MP, helped integrate Mata into Stata, and has helped develop some of Stata’s numerical techniques. David has also published papers on econometric methods and been principal investigator on two large research grants. His current research interests are in causal inference and spatial econometrics.
Materials available by email (event flyer)
Friday, April 1, 2016
Programming an estimation command in Stata and Mata
Dr. David Drukker
9am-12pm and 1-5pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This course shows how to write an estimation command for Stata. No Stata or Mata programming experience is required, but previous experience does help. The course provides an introduction to basic Stata do-file programming, and proceeds to advanced ado-file programming. After providing an introduction to Mata, the byte-compiled matrix language that is part of Stata, the course shows how to implement numerical methods for linear and nonlinear statistical methods in Stata/Mata.
Course outline
Part 1 (9am-12pm)
- The syntax of Stata estimation commands
- Basic Stata programming
- Programming an estimation command in Stata
Part 2 (1-5pm)
- An introduction to the Mata matrix language
- Basic Stata/Mata programming
- Using optimize() to implement nonlinear statistical estimators in Stata/Mata programs
David M. Drukker (Executive Director of Econometrics) has been with Stata since he finished his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin over 15 years ago. He has developed many Stata commands for analyzing panel data, time-series data, and cross-sectional data. He played a key role in the initial development of Stata MP, helped integrate Mata into Stata, and has helped develop some of Stata’s numerical techniques. David has also published papers on econometric methods and been principal investigator on two large research grants. His current research interests are in causal inference and spatial econometrics.
Materials available by email (event flyer)
Friday, April 8, 2016
Introduction to Questionnaire Design
Heather Terhune Marti
2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
A well-designed and tested survey questionnaire is one of the most powerful tools that researchers in education, health, business and public policy, and the social sciences have to obtain accurate and reliable measurements of a wide range of attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and behaviors. In this workshop, I will review ten best practices in questionnaire design that may be used when creating web, mail, telephone and/or face-to-face data collection instruments.
Heather Terhune Marti is a Study Director at the IU Center for Survey Research. She has 20+ years of survey research experience and has directed 75+ research studies for the Center.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)
Friday, April 15, 2016
Collecting and Analyzing Social Media Data Using SocialMediaLab
Dr. Robert Ackland
2-5pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
Visit Dr. Ackland's workshop page to prepare for today's workshop
VOSON SocialMediaLab is an R package that provides a suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. It provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) and generating different types of networks for analysis. SocialMediaLab also collects the associated text data from social media platforms (e.g. Tweets, Facebook fan page posts and comments, YouTube video comments).
In this workshop, participants will learn how to collect various types of social media data using SocialMediaLab and generate different types of ‘ready-made’ networks for analysis. Participants will also learn basic network and text analysis using R packages such as igraph and tm.
Assumed knowledge: A basic familiarity of R (or other programming languages) and basic concepts from network and text analysis.
Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. His PhD was in economics, focusing on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality. Robert has been studying online social and organisational networks since 2002 and his research has been funded by five Australian Research Council grants. His research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab which was established in 2005 with the aim of advancing the social science of the Internet by conducting research, developing research tools, and providing research training. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialisation in the ANU's Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in 2013. He created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide.
Materials available by email (event flyer, presentation slides, tutorial handout)
Friday, April 22, 2016
Qualitative Research for the 21st Century:
Reviewing Purposes and Claims, Data Identification Procedures, and Video-based Interaction Analysis
Dr. Frederick Erickson
2-4:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
This is a workshop in three parts. First, a brief commentary on the present situation of qualitative social inquiry, emphasizing current tensions around the aims and conduct of such research. Second, an interactive exercise in “finding and analyzing data” as an alternative to coding approaches built into commercially produced software packages. Third, an example of “microethnography of social interaction” in an analysis of a videotaped academic advising interview as manifesting interactional trouble and nondeliberate racism.
Frederick Erickson is George F. Kneller Professor of Anthropology and Education, Emeritus and Professor of Applied Linguistics, Emeritus at UCLA.
Materials available by email (event flyer)
Friday, April 29, 2016
Beginning Text Analysis with R
Dr. Tassie Gniady
2:30-4:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)
R is an open source language for statistical programming and graphics. With libraries oriented towards text mining, and one even called twitteR, using R to analyze social and humanities data has gotten easier than ever. This workshop will introduce some basics of R and guide you through a scaffolded approach to learning R that includes written tutorials, online web apps, dynamic notebooks, and downloadable code. In this session we will generate basic word clouds and cluster dendrograms.
With undergraduate degrees in Math and English, a PhD in English Literature, and a Masters in Information Science, Tassie just likes to go to school. She is also delighted to be the Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Humanities Manager in Research Technologies at UITS. Her job combines all her varied interests and lets her continue to experiment.
Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)