Digital Humanities

Sand Mining - Plugging a Critical Data Gap

May 14, 2024
Suraj Nair
by Suraj Nair. Excessive sand mining is causing a global ecological crisis. In this blog post, I present why sand mining is one of the most pressing challenges facing the planet, and why persistent data gaps hinder accountability and monitoring. I also discuss an ongoing research project of mine where we combine freely available satellite imagery and machine learning models to build open-source sand mine detection tools that can plug some of these data gaps.

Conceptual Mirrors: Reflecting on LLMs' Interpretations of Ideas

April 23, 2024
María Martín López
by María Martín López. As large language models begin to engrain themselves in our daily lives we must leverage cognitive psychology to explore the understanding that these algorithms have of our world and the people they interact with. LLMs give us new insights into how conceptual representations are formed given the limitations of data modalities they have access to. Is language enough for these models to conceptualize the world? If so, what conceptualizations do they have of us?

Tactics for Text Mining non-Roman Scripts

April 15, 2024
Hilary Faxon, Ph.D.
by Hilary Faxon, Ph.D. & Win Moe. Non-Roman scripts pose particular challenges for text mining. Here, we reflect on a project that used text mining alongside qualitative coding to understand the politicization of online content following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup.

Hilary Faxon, Ph.D.

Data Science Fellow
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Dr. Faxon is an ethnographer who uses social media and critical remote sensing to understand and reimagine social justice in technology, environment, and development in the Global South. She is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of Montana.

Computational Social Science in a Social World: Challenges and Opportunities

March 26, 2024
José Aveldanes
by José Aveldanes. The rise of AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science are harbingers of the need for a significant shift in social science research. Computational Social Science enables us to go beyond traditional methods such as Ordinary Least Squares, which face challenges in addressing complexities of social phenomena, particularly in modeling nonlinear relationships and managing high-dimensionality data. This paradigmatic shift requires that we embrace these new tools to understand social life and necessitates understanding methodological and ethical challenges, including bias and representation. The integration of these technologies into social science research calls for a collaborative approach among social scientists, technologists, and policymakers to navigate the associated risk and possibilities of these new tools.

Using Big Data for Development Economics

March 18, 2024
Leïla Njee Bugha
by Leïla Njee Bugha. The proliferation of new sources of data emerging from 20th and 21st century technologies such as social media, internet, and mobile phones offers new opportunities for development economics research. Where such research was limited or impeded by existing data gaps or limited statistical capacity, big data can be used as a stopgap and help accurately quantify economic activity and inform policymaking in many different fields of research. Reduced cost and improved reliability are some key benefits of using big data for development economics, but as with all research designs, it requires thoughtful consideration of potential risks and harms.

What Are Vowels Made Of? Graphing a Classic Dataset with R

February 13, 2024
Anna Björklund
by Anna Björklund. Vowels are all around us. Mainstream US English has around twelve unique vowels. How can our brains tell these sounds apart? This blog post will help you answer this question by plotting vowel data from a classic American English dataset by Peterson and Barney (1952).

Addison Pickrell

IUSE Undergraduate Advisory Board
Mathematics
Sociology

Addison is an aspiring mathematician and social scientist (Class of '27). He loves collecting books he'll never read, is an open-source and open-access advocate, and an aspiring community organizer and systems disrupter. Ask me about community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), critical pedagogy, applied mathematics, and social science.

Tracking Urban Expansion Through Satellite Imagery

December 12, 2023
Leïla Njee Bugha
by Leïla Njee Bugha. Among its many uses, remote sensing can prove especially useful to document changes and trends from eras or settings, where traditional sources are either inexistent or infrequently collected. This is the case when one wants to study urban expansion in sub-Saharan countries over the past 20 years. To further remedy the lack of data on land cover uses from earlier time periods, classification methods can be used as well. Using easily accessible satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine, I provide here an example combining remote sensing with classification to detect changes in the land cover in Nigeria since 2000 due to urban expansion.

The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same?

December 18, 2023
Tonya Lindsey, Ph.D.
By Tonya D. Lindsey, Ph.D. Think about how often you hear someone gripe about the deterioration of society and then blame the Internet or social media. This blog suggests that the things we are exposed to virtually are not new but instead present us with more and frequent opportunities to reflect on perennial social problems and find solutions even as we better understand ourselves as individuals in a global community.