The Future and Social Science: Text, Sensors, Symbolic Interaction, and Pro-Social Design
Channel: Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)
Date: 15/04/2016

BIDS Data Science Lecture Series | April 15, 2016 | 1:10-2:30 p.m. | 190 Doe Library, UC Berkeley

Speaker: Nick Adams, Research Fellow, BIDS

The world is not well. As we witness rampant dysfunction in our social, political, and economic institutions, many observers wonder why social science is not saving the day (and if computer science will manage a rescue instead). We can blame forces outside the academy, but the practical impotence of the social sciences also reflects the difficulties of social measurement and conservatism of our practices. So, what is social science to do? In a dispatch from the data science frontier, Dr. Nick Adams shares his vision of a future where social science's long under-tested meso-level theories of symbolic interaction and social psychology meet the big complex text and sensor data needed to give them new life and constructive power. Highlighting innovative methods scaling qualitative explanation to quantitative analysis, Adams sounds a bold call for the kind of social science this moment requires.