Studying Society in the Internet-era: New Approaches to Social Research
Wiki Surveys: Open and Quantifiable Social Data Collection
Tuesday, March 6, 4pm, 206 Ingraham Hall
Working Together to figure stuff out: Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science
Wednesday, March 7, 4pm, 8417 Social Science
Public workshop: “Finding the Best Ideas in the World: Practical Issues in the Uses of Wiki Surveys”
Thursday, March 8, 12:20pm, 8108 Social Science
Co-sponsored by GLOBAL STUDIES.
The March 8 workshop will focus on the practical issues that arise when using allourideas.org to conduct wiki surveys. This hands-on workshop will begin by describing many of the different ways that the site has been used in the past. Next, Salganik will describe the main steps in creating and running a wiki survey, and he will offer advice based on the experiences of groups that he has worked with in the past. Further, he will describe the data that can be downloaded from the site for analysis. Finally, he will describe how our open-source code (https://github.com/allourideas) can be customized for different applications, focusing on projects by the government of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (http://blog.allourideas.org/post/14248022671/governor-genro-tops-president-obama-on-citizen) and Wikipedia (http://blog.allourideas.org/post/16175975017/wikipedia-banner-challenge-results). Theoretical and statistical issues will be described in detail at the talk on Tuesday and will only be addressed in this talk on an as needed basis. Participants are encouraged to come with problems for which they are considering using wiki surveys. Laptops are welcome, but not required.
MATTHEW SALGANIK is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. His interests include social networks, quantitative methods, and web-based social research. One main area of his research has focused on developing network-based statistical methods for studying populations most at risk for HIV/AIDS. A second main area of work has been using the World Wide Web to collect and analyze social data in innovative ways. Salganik’s research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and Google.