Computational Social Science & Data Collection

Eungang Peter Choi

11/08/2019

Outline

Outline

  1. Introduction
  2. Why Collect Data?
  3. Applications
  4. Conclusion

Introduction

Things I do

  • Demography

    • Fertility
    • Mortality
  • Sociology

    • Inequality
    • Race
  • Computational Social Science

  • Social Network Analysis

  • Natural Language Processing

Why Collect Data?

Research Question

Does data limit the question you can ask?

Think about auto.dta…

  • How does price of cars change over time?
  • How does preference for cars differ by age/race/ gender/place?

Data is everywhere!

Sephora Cry Data

Source: Connie Ye (@crabbage_ on Twitter)

See Sephora Cry Data

Applications

1. Information on Social Media

Research Question: What are people’s perceptions on Fertilty?

Twitter Data

  • Parse Tweets with keywords relevant to fertility (e.g. babies, diapers, baby shower, breastfeeding)
  • Positive/negative?
  • Objective/subjective?
  • Determine gender using user’s name
  • Time and day of tweet
  • Device info

2. Combining Traditional Data with New Sources of Information

Research Question: How does access to transportation relate to spatial inequality?

COTA Bus Lines

  • 120+ Bus lines and 3200+ bus stops
  • Matrix
  • Network analysis
  • Combine with food desert/income/race data

Bus Network

3. Using Technology to get Data

Research Question: Are user-based rating systems (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb) fair?

Airbnb Data

  • 250,000+ Airbnb listings in 28 US cities
  • Host picture
  • face recognition
  • skin color information (RGB, HSV, YCrCb, LAB)
  • Machine learning (scale 1-5)
  • text analysis (NLP)

Variables

  • skin tone
  • price of house
  • superhost?
  • number of reviews?
  • expected rating based on text reviews

Conclusion

What do you want to do?

  • get a job/work?
  • grad school?

  • Don’t let data limit your research question
  • Data is everywhere!
    • self-logging
    • Websites
    • social media

Interested?

Get upto 3 credit hours twoards your Experiential Learning Requirement -

https://www.eungangchoi.com