Suchergebnisse

In a critique of public opinion (PO) polls, some of the assumptions & problems associated with survey research & democratic theory are explored, concluding that "no-opinion" responses are a problem. Michel Foucault's understanding of power & modern social institutions is applied to the practice of PO polling to show that polls work as a disciplinary mechanism that creates a modern public that has opinions, & that the consequences of this process include the exercise of power, surveillance, & control. 37 References. AA

New Curation Software: Step-by-Step Preparation of Social Science Data and Code for Publication and Preservation

This study analyzes the language through which journalists comprehend the nature and meaning of the urban community. It employs content analysis and interviews with reporters to critique the discourse of urban pathology - that is, the conceptual system often used to think and write about economically distressed neighborhoods. Rather than suggesting that all the "bad news "from these neighborhoods merely be balanced with "good news," this study promotes a vocabulary of community assets - a set of terms that can enhance the power of journalistic language to describe the community. Such a vocabulary, the study concludes, would make a useful contribution to the practice of civic journalism.

ABSTRACTComputational reproducibility, or the ability to reproduce analytic results of a scientific study on the basis of publicly available code and data, is a shared goal of many researchers, journals, and scientific communities. Researchers in many disciplines including political science have made strides toward realizing that goal. A new challenge, however, has arisen. Code too often becomes obsolete within only a few years. We document this problem with a random sample of studies posted to the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) Data Archive; we encountered nontrivial errors in seven of 20 studies. In line with similar proposals for the long-term maintenance of data and commercial software, we propose that researchers dedicated to computational reproducibility should have a plan in place for "active maintenance" of their analysis code. We offer concrete suggestions for how data archives, journals, and research communities could encourage and reward the active maintenance of scientific code and data.

Scientific reproducibility has captured the attention of academics, technologists, government agencies, private funders, and the public. We focus on computational reproducibility -- the ability to obtain the same results from the data and code used in the original study -- for two reasons. One, computational reproducibility is essential for understanding the complete scholarly record. Two, as data managers and archivists, we strongly feel that a test of computational reproducibility should factor into decisions about preserving and sharing these materials. Repositories have a responsibility to ensure the materials comprising the scholarly record can be used as expected in the long term. We advocate for curating for reproducibility (CURE), which involves activities that ensure that statistical and analytic claims about given data can be reproduced with that data. This 3-hour workshop is intended for librarians, data curators, and researchers of diverse professional backgrounds and experience. Participants will be introduced to the topic of curating for reproducibility, hear perspectives from three institutions practicing curating for reproducibility; learn about the CURE workflow and how to curate for reproducibility using YARD, a curation tool, using examples and hands-on activities. Participants will be invited to test YARD and deposit their own data and code.

With the emergence and rapid acceptance of online news come new and varied opportunities for user engagement with content, along with alternative metrics for capturing those behaviors. This study focuses on interactive engagement with online news videos. We propose a theoretical framework for conceptualizing user engagement on a continuum from exposure to interactivity. Furthermore, we make a distinction between user–content (e.g. commenting) and user–user (e.g. replying to another user's comment) modes of interaction. We then explore publicly available measures of these concepts and test a series of hypotheses to explore commenting and conversational behaviors in response to YouTube news videos. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications for advancing our understanding of user engagement with online news.