Title: Mapping Complexity in the Social Sciences: Big Data, Social Media & Data Visualization
Event type: Workshop & seminar
When: September 23-24, 2015
Where: Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ (Science Hall, Sokol Seminar room for morning session & University Hall Room 1120 for afternoon workshop)
Synopsis
This two-day workshop will bring together international programmers, designers, developers and researchers from across multiple disciplines to explore innovative forms of studying and analyzing big data and social media. It introduces participants to different software technologies that help visualize these data sets with the goal of preserving correlational and causal complexity.
The first part of the workshop features introductory remakrs by Dean Robert Friedman who is the head of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair and a passionate advocate of digital humanities. Following the Dean’s speech, Arnaud Kurze, the conference organizer and Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair, will present an overview of the project and collaboration prospects. Then Donato Ricci, Lead Designer at Medialab Sciences Po in Paris (France), will introduce the link between different methodological concepts including content extraction, data analysis and visualization. Professor Ricci is the founder of a text-analysis software called Sven, an experimental tool to collect, organize and analyze text fragments from online and offline documents. By increasing the information accessibility via visualization methods and automatic term extractions, tools like Sven allow researchers to follow emerging issues through time and provides them with a better understanding on the information collected. In the afternoon, he will lead a
hands-on workshop session, responding to questions, such as: What forms of visualization are most suited for particular data sets? How do we process big amounts of data effectively and present them coherently and compellingly?
Day 2 includes a lecture by Daniele Guido, Researcher at the Digital Humanities Lab at the Centre Virtuel de la Connais- sance sur l’Europe (Luxembourg). Building on the concepts elaborated the previous day, his methodology-based talk will focus on the study of networks, concepts and actors. To this end, he will introduce the web platform histoGraph, a tool that helps researchers explore large multimedia archives. This platform also enables users to find and identify the most relevant documents for research and helps discover connections between individuals based on the selected doc- uments in the archive. Additionally, Katherine Herbert, and Jerry Alan Fails, both Associate Professors of Computer Science at Montclair State University, will present their research on big data, mobile phone applications and environmental issues. The afternoon session of Day 2 will be dedicated to applying the theoretical concepts of the morning lecture in a praxis-oriented and interactive workshop setting. Questions that will be addressed include: Who is connected to whom? Who is influential in different networks? And, time permitting, how do geographical factors affect social connections online?
For more information please see attached conference brochure or email the conference organizer Professor Arnaud Kurze at kurzea@mail.montclair.edu
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