At the National Conference on Citizenship in Washington, DC, 250-300 people are collectively building a model of civic life in America to strategize about civi renewal. Here is the state of the map as of 1:55 pm.
PS: And here’s a larger version as it stood at the end of the day.
We are so excited that NCDD 2016 starts today! We are going to have a weekend jam packed with incredible workshops, inspiring speakers, and of course, hundreds of members of our amazing D&D community all in one place! 
We can’t wait to spend the weekend in conversation with you all, exploring the challenges and opportunities of bridging our divides, and envisioning the direction of our field. It’s not to late to join if you’re in the Boston area – check out the registration page here and consider registering for even just one day at the $175 one-day registration rate!
Nothing makes the conference feel real like having the printed conference guide in your hand, and here it is! Make sure to get your hard copy at registration or follow along with the electronic version here.
We also encourage you to check out the full schedule online or look over the details of all of the great conference workshop sessions here. Start scoping out which sessions you will be joining!
NCDD will be keeping you up to date on about what’s happening during the conference via our social media outlets, so make sure to be part of the conversation! Our Social Media Coordinator Keiva Hummel will be live tweeting the whole conferece on Twitter, so follow us @NCDD and using the hashtags #NCDD2016, #BridgingOurDivides, and #NCDDEmergingLeaders.
You can also follow along on NCDD’s Facebook page or on Instagram via ncdd_network. These will all be great ways to be part of the conversation even if you’re not here with us in Massachusetts.
In my Network Visualization class, we’ve been talking a lot about methodologies for design research studies. On that topic, I recently read an interesting article by Michael Sedlmair, Miriah Meyer, and Tamara Munzner: Design Study Methodology: Reflections from the Trenches and the Stacks, after conducting a literature review to determine best practices, they realized that there were no best practices – at least not organized in a coherent, practical to follow way.
Thus, the authors aim to develop “holistic methodological approaches for conducting design studies,” drawn from their combined experiences as researchers as well as from their review of the literature in this field. They define the scope of their work very clearly: they aim to develop a practical guide to determine methodological approaches in “problem-driven research,” that is, research where “the goal is to work with real users to solve their real-world problems.”
Their first step in doing so is to define a 2-dimensional space in which any proposed research task can be placed. One axis looks at task clarity (from fuzzy to crisp) and the other looks at information location (from head to computer). These strike me as helpful axises for positioning a study and for thinking about what kinds of methodologies are appropriate. If your task is very fuzzy, for example, you may want to start with a study that clarifies the specific tasks which need to be examined. If your task is very crisp, and can be articulated computationally…perhaps you don’t need a visualization study but can rather do everything algorithmically.
From my own experience of user studies in a marketing context, I found these axes a very helpful framework for thinking about specific needs and outcomes – and therefore appropriate methodologies – of a research study.
The authors then go into their nine-stage framework for practical guidance in conducting design studies and their 32 identified pitfalls which can occur throughout the framework.
The report can be distilled more briefly into 5 steps a researcher should go through in designing, implementing, and sharing a study. These five stages should feed into each other and are not necessarily neatly chronological:
Their paper, of course, goes into much greater detail about each of these five steps. But overall, I find this a helpful heuristic in thinking about the steps one should go through.
New chapter: “Democracy in the Digital Age,” The Civic Media Reader, edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 29-47
Abstract: Digital media change rapidly, but democracy presents perennial challenges. It is not in people’s individual interests to participate, yet we need them to participate ethically and wisely. It’s easier for more advantaged people to participate. And the ethical values that guide personal relationships tend to vanish in large-scale interactions. The digital era brings special versions of those challenges: choice has been massively disaggregated, sovereignty is ambiguous, states can collect intrusive information about people, and states no longer need much support from their own citizens. I argue that these underlying conditions make democracy difficult in the digital age.
At the end of this week, Northeastern will host the seventh annual research conference on “New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data.”
I’m very excited for this conference which brings together scholars from many different universities and disciplines to discuss developments in text as data research. This year’s conference is cohosted by David Smith and my advisor Nick Beauchamp, and I’ve been busily working on getting everything in order for it.
Here is the description from the conference website:
The main purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers from the social sciences, computer science and linguistics to investigate new approaches to utilizing text in social science research. Text has always been a valuable resource for research, and recent developments in automatic language-processing methodologies from the fields of information retrieval, natural language processing, and machine learning are creating unprecedented opportunities for searching, categorizing, and extracting social science information from text.
Previous conferences took place at Harvard University, Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and New York University. Selection of participants and papers for the conferences is the responsibility of a team led by Nick Beauchamp (Northeastern) and David Smith (Northeastern), along with Ken Benoit (LSE), Yejin Choi (University of Washington), and Arthur Spirling (NYU).
