Your Big Data and Social Research Roundup

April marked a milestone for social science and industry partnerships, with Facebook announcing a new initiative to give scholars access to its data in order to help them assess social media’s impact on elections. The move, which sees the tech giant partnering with the Social Science Research Council and seven major non-profit foundations, has been largely welcomed by the research community as a positive step towards enabling academic research and establishing regulation. It is the first initiative to utilize Gary King and Nate Persily’s A New Model for Industry-Academic Partnerships, which proposes making industry data available to academics via an independent, transparent peer-review process. The SSRC also announced the formation of its new Social Data Initiative to “examine the problems, explore questions about the responsible use of social network data, and generate insights to inform solutions”. Read our full blog post about the Facebook and SSRC initiatives here. We’re also pleased to say that the SAGE Ocean initiative was reviewed positively by Outsell at the end of last month. Jo Mcshea, VP & Lead Analyst said: “A great initiative targeting social scientists, SAGE Ocean is also an interesting case study in establishing new innovation units within traditional publishing organizations. Analyst Ranking: Positive.” Courses starting soon on SAGE Campus: Introduction to Data Science for Social Scientists This course provides all the theory and info you need for understanding data science methods from a social science perspective. Introduction to Data Visualisation Learn from Andy Kirk, data visualisation guru, how to transform your data into powerful visualisations and infographics. Free Webinar: Text Mining for Social Scientists Gabe Ignatow and Rada Mihalcea discussed the fundamentals of text mining for social scientists