Talk on “Bridging big data and qualitative methods in the social sciences”

Date: Jan 3rd 2018

Time: 2:15 PM

Location: TBD

Abstract: With the rise of social media, a vast amount of new primary research material has become available to social scientists, but the sheer volume and variety of this make it difficult to access through the traditional approaches: close reading and nuanced interpretations of manual qualitative coding and analysis. This work sets out to bridge the gap by developing semi-automated replacements for manual coding through a mixture of crowdsourcing and machine learning, seeded by the development of a careful manual coding scheme from a small sample of data. To show the promise of this approach, we attempt to create a nuanced categorisation of responses on Twitter to several cases of extreme circumstances.

Bio of speaker:

Dima is a Senior Data Scientist at Skyscanner where his focus is on developing and optimizing the Skyscanner’s travel search engine. Prior to Skyscanner, Dima was with King’s College London where he worked on analysis of BBC iPlayer (a joint project with BBC) and various social media websites (Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, etc.). He contributes to the data mining (KDD, WWW, etc.) and computer networks communities (Infocom, ComMag, etc.) and have his works featured by New Scientist, BBC News and other media outlets. Dima has also co-founded and was a former CEO of Stanfy.com. More information – https://karamshuk.github.io/.