Research Project

Fritz_X_DargesBlue42… Who Are You?

January 14, 2025
by Jonathan Pérez. Reflecting on the complexities of the human experience is paramount to conducting research. Jonathan Pérez, through his exploration of a conspiracy subreddit, reflects on his experience trying to find the human behind the datum. Jonathan critiques the harmful effects of dehumanizing rhetoric and the researcher’s responsibility to navigate ethical implications. In doing so, he establishes three guiding rules to support researchers seeking to humanize their analysis: 1) a researcher must always find the story behind the data; 2) a researcher must protect themselves; 3) a researcher must still humanize participants (even those who perpetuate harmful narratives).

Tom van Nuenen, Ph.D.

Data/Research Scientist, Senior Consultant, and Senior Instructor
D-Lab
Social Sciences
Digital Humanities

I work as a Lecturer, Data Scientist, and Senior Consultant at UC Berkeley's D-Lab. I lead the curriculum design for D-Lab’s data science workshop portfolio, as well as the Digital Humanities Summer Program at Berkeley.

Former research projects include a Research Associate position in the ‘Discovering and Attesting Digital Discrimination’ project at King’s College London (2019-2022) and a researcher-in-residence role for the UK’s National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction, and Adversarial Influence Online (2022). My research uses Natural Language Processing methods to
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Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

February 18, 2025, 9:00am
Are you starting a research project at UC Berkeley that involves human subjects? If so, one of the first steps you will need to take is getting IRB approval.

What are Time Series Made of?

December 10, 2024
by Bruno Smaniotto. Trend-cycle decompositions are statistical tools that help us understand the different components of Time Series – Trend, Cycle, Seasonal, and Error. In this blog post, we will provide an introduction to these methods, focusing on the intuition behind the definition of the different components, providing real-life examples and discussing applications.

Language Models in Mental Health Conversations – How Empathetic Are They Really?

December 3, 2024
by Sohail Khan. Language models are becoming integral to daily life as trusted sources of advice. While their utility has expanded from simple tasks like text summarization to more complex interactions, the empathetic quality of their responses is crucial. This article explores methods to assess the emotional appropriateness of these models, using metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and Sentence Transformers. By analyzing models like LLaMA in mental health dialogues, we learn that while they suffer through traditional word-based metrics, LLaMA's performance in capturing empathy through semantic similarity is promising. In addition, we must advocate for continuous monitoring to ensure these models support their users' mental well-being effectively.

GitHub is Not Just for Coding: The Powerful Task Management Tool in Your Back Pocket

November 26, 2024
by Elena Stacy. This article introduces the use of GitHub as a task management tool for researchers in any field – even if your project doesn’t involve coding. GitHub is a free tool that many researchers already use in some capacity, and can be easily adapted specifically to task management to enable transparent project collaboration and documentation. We walk through the advantages of using GitHub for this purpose, and provide a comprehensive tutorial on how to get up and running with GitHub as a task management tool for your own projects.

A Recipe for Reliable Discoveries: Ensuring Stability Throughout Your Data Work

November 19, 2024
by Jaewon Saw. Imagine perfecting a favorite recipe, then sharing it with others, only to find their results differ because of small changes in tools or ingredients. How do you ensure the dish still reflects your original vision? This challenge captures the principle of stability in data science: achieving acceptable consistency in outcomes relative to reasonable perturbations of conditions and methods. In this blog post, I reflect on my research journey and share why grounding data work in stability is essential for reproducibility, adaptability, and trust in the final results.

Python Data Processing Basics for Acoustic Analysis

November 12, 2024
by Amber Galvano. Interested in learning how to merge data and metadata from multiple sources into a consolidated dataset? Dealing with annotated audio and want to automate your workflow? Tried Praat scripting but want something more streamlined? This blog post will walk through some key domain-specific Python-based tools you will need in order to take your audio data, annotations, and speaker metadata and come away with a tabular dataset containing acoustic measures, ready to visualize and submit to statistical analysis. This tutorial uses acoustic phonetics data, but can be adapted to a range of projects involving repeated measures data and/or work with audio files.

Exploring Rental Affordability in the San Francisco Bay Area Neighborhoods with R

November 5, 2024
by Taesoo Song. Many American cities continue to face severe rental burdens. However, we rarely examine rental affordability through the lens of quantitative data. In this blog post, I demonstrate how to download and visualize rental affordability data for the San Francisco Bay Area using R packages like `tidycensus` and `sf`. This exercise shows that mapping census data can be a straightforward and powerful way to understand the spatial patterns of housing dynamics and can offer valuable insights for research, policy, and advocacy.

Human-Centered Design for Migrant Rights

October 29, 2024
by Victoria Hollingshead. In honor of the 2024 International Day of Care and Support, Victoria Hollingshead shares her recent work with the Center for Migrant Advocacy’s Direct Assistance Program and their innovative approach to supporting Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) using generative AI. OFWs, especially female domestic workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), are vulnerable to exploitation from foreign employers and recruitment agencies while having limited access to legal support. Using a design thinking framework, Victoria and CMA’s Direct Assistance team co-designed a proof of concept to enhance the legal and contract literacy among OFWs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a top destination country. This project shows promise in leveraging emerging technologies to empower OFWs, enhancing the Philippines' reputation as a migrant champion and supporting the nation's broader push for digital transformation.