Technology for Measurement

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Today’s social scientists have access to a diverse toolbox of software for analyzing data, but when it comes to gathering the data in the first place, surprisingly few standardized solutions are available.

To tackle this challenge, Social Science Matrix is sponsoring a year-long research seminar called “T4M,” or “Technology for Measurement,” which seeks to examine the landscape of existing data-gathering tools, with an eye toward developing new approaches and training for measuring social data in all its forms.

“There has been an enormous surge in interest in data science, but that is generally focused on data that is already collected and in a nice format,” says Dav Clark, a data scientist with UC Berkeley’s D-Lab, who is leading the Matrix seminar. “Particularly in the social sciences, everything up to that point is where the hard work is. You can find small communities that have written software that does what you want, but it’s hard to adapt and integrate. This [seminar] is meant to be a survey of different approaches that people are using for data collection and management.”

For more about this research team, please see the full version of this article.