The TecHealth Initiative at UWM hosted a “discovery” event exploring research intersections between social science and big data on Friday, April 20th from noon to 2:30 PM. Our goal was to bring social and “big data” scientists together to explore how we might better collaborate to solve research problems.
UWM’s Jake Luo (Health Informatics & Administration), Noelle Chesley (Sociology), and W. Hobart Davies (Psychology) provided some background about how expertise in big data and social science might be combined in research settings. UWM librarians Carrie Wade and Kristin Briney also introduced data resources of interest to social scientists. Workshop attendees were local researchers from both the computational and social sciences who had the opportunity to discuss both areas, allowing social scientists think more about the implications of big data for their work and vice-versa.