Keynote Lectures
Wednesday September 10th: 16:30-18:00
Title: Ensuring Social Scientific Data Quality and Reproducibility in the Big Data/AI Era: Challenges and Pathways by Prof. Stefan Dietze
Abstract: Throughout the last decades, the social sciences have increasingly adopted novel forms of research data, e.g. data mined from the web and social media platforms. This together with the recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and related areas, e.g. natural language processing (NLP), led to a much more widespread adoption of diverse computational methods, including techniques from machine learning and, most prominently, large language models. However, increasingly complex computational methods lead to new challenges with respect to transparency, reproducibility and overall quality of social science research and data, further elevating an already widely recognised reproducibility crisis. This talk will, one the one hand, introduce challenges posed by the use of AI-based methods in social science research. On the other hand, it will show pathways to address such problems. Examples are works geared towards sharing computational (AI) methods in the social sciences in a reproducible and citable way, for understanding and tracing adoption of and relations between methods and datasets at large scale, e.g. in social science research in general (e.g. by mining scientific publications) or novel ways for providing access to sensitive research data in the social sciences (e.g. social media data) to facilitate reproducible research without violating ethical or legal constraints or principles.
Stefan Dietze is full professor for Data & Knowledge Engineering at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (HHU), and scientific director of the department Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences (KTS) at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne (Germany). He is also deputy director at the Heine Center for Artificial Intelligence & Data Science (HeiCAD) at HHU and affiliated with the L3S Research Center (Hannover, Germany) and the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet & Democracy (DIID). His research is at the intersection of natural language processing, information retrieval and machine learning, specifically aimed at developing AI-based method for mining and understanding large volumes of data, such as data mined from the Web and social media platforms, and their application in the social sciences. Stefan has obtained substantial research funding as PI and Co-PI at national and international level and he frequently publishes at top tier conferences such as EMNLP, NAACL, The WebConf, SIGIR or Web Science and in high impact journals, where he also serves as editorial board and program committee member.
Thursday September 11th: 10:30-12:00
Title: The Tangible Truth: Quality Assessment beyond the Gold Standard into the Age of New Materialism by Prof. Karin Hannes
Abstract: Coming soon.
Prof. Karin Hannes runs the transdisciplinary research group SoMeTHin’K in the Faculty of Social Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. She explores the potential of artistic, embodied and futuring approaches to develop and narrate activating stories that articulate the kind of city urban dwellers desire. With her innovative, co-creative research approaches she actively pushes for social change in society. Karin works from an activist, inclusive perspective. She contributes to an increased sense of belonging and connection between different agents populating particular neighborhoods. Karin chairs the European Network of Qualitative Inquiry and curates Townsquare13, a free space for lateral thinkers in her home town.
Welcome Plenary & Roundtable
Wednesday September 10th: 13:00-14:30
Title: Countering Mistrust in Research and Science: The Role of Methods
Abstract: Science, its institutions and its processes of producing knowledge are increasingly being called into question by research participants, potential research beneficiaries, the political sphere and the public more broadly. Reasons for this mistrust are diverse: From a lack of understanding of scientific processes, a general mistrust of elites, to personal experiences, having felt exploited, marginalized and mistreated by researchers, the inability of science to adequately cover and understand different experiences and perhaps acknowledge different ways of knowing, to the instrumentalization of science skepticism for political ends. Proposals to address these trends have included a call for increased transparency and replicability in scientific research, more participatory and inclusive research processes, the need to address racial and other biases in research, a redistribution of the resources and benefits that drive a global system of research production, and so on. In this roundtable diverse experts from different fields of social science and different methodological schools discuss the role the research methods (and ethics as an integral part of our methods toolsets) can, should and perhaps cannot play in addressing the mistrust, distrust and scepticism research and science are facing from their various constituencies.
Timothy C. Guetterman, PhD, is an applied research methodologist specialized in general research design and mixed methods research. Tim is an Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Mixed Methods Program at the University of Michigan. His methodological interest is to advance rigorous methods of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research, particularly strategies for intersecting and integrating qualitative and quantitative research. He also conducts NIH-funded health services research with a particular focus on improving health services using informatics technology. Tim also focuses on teaching, learning, and research methods capacity building. He has extensive professional experience conducting program evaluation with a focus on educational and healthcare programs. He co-authored the sixth and seventh editions of Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, with John W. Creswell. He serves as Co-Editor in Chief for the Journal of Mixed Methods Research.
Emmanuel Remi Aiyede is a professor of political institutions, governance, and public policy in the department of political science at the University of Ibadan. He is the current head of the political science department (01 August 2020), former Sub-Dean of Faculty of the Social Sciences (2012-2014), and former coordinator of the Leadership and Governance Programme (2010-2014) at the Centre for Sustainable Development at the University of Ibadan. He was also a visiting scholar at the Electoral Institute, Independent National Electoral Commission, Abuja (2016-2017) and visiting fellow of the Transregional Centre for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at New School University in New York in 2000. He began his career as a fellow at the Governance Unit of the Development Policy Centre (DPC), an independent think tank in Ibadan in 1998, after a brief stint in journalism. He taught at the University of Lagos before joining the University of Ibadan in 2005. He has had visiting lectureship experience in several universities within and outside Africa. He has been on the Editorial Board of Nigeria’s oldest surviving newspaper, the Nigerian Tribune, since 2008. He contributes to public discourse in the Nigerian news media.
Bruna Távora holds a PhD in Communication Studies and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster’s Communication Institute, where she investigates the political economy of environmental misinformation, focusing on the links between the political uses of climate and science denialism, and the advancement of corporate interests over nature and land. As a research associate at the Getulio Vargas Foundation and at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, she has co-authored several reports on misinformation in digital platforms, addressing issues such as epistemic crisis and the influence of digital media on public debate. Bruna has also worked with civil society organizations to strengthen science communication, where she developed narratives to promote community engagement with science on environmental issues. She also received training in science communication (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin University Alliance), and in open source intelligence to counter online misinformation (Atlantic Council, USA).