TouchGraph

While at the IASSIST conference in May I learned of a neat web application called TouchGraph Google.  It maps relationships among Web sites in a networked fashion based on data from Google.  It has obvious value for Web designers and marketers and it could probably be used as a visualization tool for social science research.  For example, you could see what kinds of sites are linked to certain political Web sites or media outlets.  It’s not a rigorous networking tool, but it’s a fun and easy application.

Grad School Advice

Fabio Rojas is writing  a semi-regular series on orgtheory.net giving advice to graduate students.  The series is called Grad Skool Rulz and he currently has 10 of them.

1. Get the rules
2. Learn the unspoken rules
3. Choosing the grad skool
4. Course work
5. Passing the tests
6. Make some friends
7. Picking the advisor
8. The rest of your committee
9. Don’t pay for grad school
10. The dissertation topic 

His advice is practical, thoughtful, and well written. Current and potential grad students, as well as advisors, should read the posts and the associated discussions.

The Myth of Immigrant Criminality

Given the current public debate about immigration in the U.S., several sociologists and criminologists have been promoting research results to dispel the myth that immigrants are more prone to criminal activity than the native-born population. The Immigration Policy Center has released a special report of these findings that presents compelling evidence in a very accessible way.  Not only is this a timely political issue, but it is also a nice example of the application of academic research to important policy questions.

The Gendering of Academia

Last month the Organization of Women Faculty at UAlbany sponsored a public lecture called “The Gendering of Academia.”  Dr. Lisa Frehill, the Executive Director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST), spoke about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in academia.  Although the message was not new, the data she presented were certainly interesting, and somewhat depressing.  I had hoped to reproduce some of the statistics relevant to the social sciences here, but I was disappointed to learn that these data are not freely available from the CPST web site.  Needless to say, the social sciences had much better representation among women and minorities than the hard sciences, but some of the figures were still disturbing.

While the presentation was full of data, which I personally enjoy, it was short on solutions.  I suspect that the goal of the talk was to present the national figures in order to spur discussions about how UAlbany compares and how to address these disparities within our environment.  I think this is an admirable goal in and of itself, although I suspect that many members of the audience were from the social science disciplines and were likely to already have thought about the gendered state of academia.  Dr. Frehill did briefly mention two important factors contributing to underrepresentation: (1) the need to fill the pipeline early by encouraging academic development among women and minorities in high school and college, and (2) academic cultures that perpetuate gendered norms for success.  The last point is especially relevant for the social sciences where it is too easy to think that we have “conquered” these disparities because we have met certain thresholds of participation.

Emotional Maps

Here is yet another post on the theme of visualization.  Last month I attended a conference at SUNY Oswego called A Conversation between Art and Science on Information Visualization.  The conference was heavily geared toward artists, particularly graphic artists, who use technology in their work and, to a lesser extent, computer scientists interested in personal expression and human/computer interactions.  As a social scientist I was a bit lost in the shuffle.  I felt I only had a superficial understanding of the concepts that were discussed and it wasn’t quite clear to me how they would apply to my work.  The ideas from the conference were filed away somewhere in deep storage in my brain for possible use in the future.

Recently I ran across an article on CNN that brought these ideas to the forefront again, although perhaps not in a fully coherent manner.  The CNN article highlighted the work of artist Christian Nold who creates “emotional maps” of cities.  He recruits people to wear GPS devices and polygraph sensors and to walk around certain urban areas.  He then collects the data from the devices and creates maps that “visualize the social space of a community.”  This is another interesting intersection between art and science, but is it relevant for social science?

A lot of social scientists, particularly social psychologists, are interested in how people perceive their physical environments and the effects of environments on the psyche.  This seems like an interesting way to use technology to capture the interactions of people in space and over time.  Last week Dr. Bob Agnew was at the School of Criminal Justice to deliver the annual Hindelang lecture.  While Dr. Agnew is best known for developing general strain theory, this particular talk instead focused on how to think critically about time in criminological research.  When social scientists collect longitudinal data on subjects annually, they miss the variations in their measures that occur within a given year.  In other words, we tend to think of certain traits as stable over time, when in fact they could fluctuate a great deal on a short-term basis.  One of his methodological suggestions for capturing short-term temporal variation was to use more frequent and more detailed data collection methods, such as daily diaries.   He even suggested harnessing technology, such as text messengers, for this task.  It seems like the technology used by Nold could be adapted for micro-level criminological research as well and could add an interesting perspective on the situational, emotional, and psychological aspects of crime commission.