SODAS Data Discussion #1 (Fall 2024)
Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) aspires to be a resource for all students and researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We therefore invite researchers across the faculty to present ongoing research projects, project applications or just loose ideas that relate to the subject of social data science.
Two researchers will present their work. The rules are simple: Short presentations of ten minutes are followed by twenty minutes of debate. No papers will be circulated beforehand, and the presentations cannot be longer than five slides.
Discussion 1
Presenter: Torben Heien Nielsen
Title: The Anatomy of Paradigm Shifts - The Role of Healthcare Professionals in the Proliferation of Ideas over 500 Years from 1479-2000
Abstract:
A fundamental question in economics asks for the roots of history’s great mortality transition when life expectancy rose from 40 to 80 years in less than a century. We depart from the insight that science, knowledge, and technology are keys to any coherent explanation and combine this idea with results from research on contemporary economies, that physician beliefs about best practice and peer interactions are key inputs for population health. We ask two overarching questions: 1) What role did networks of healthcare professionals play in the spread and growth of medical ideas and innovations in the healthcare sector over a 500-year period? 2) How did the transmission of ideas and innovation ultimately benefit the health of the general population and the inequality across heterogeneous population groups? By training an artificial neural network to read more than 90,000 individual biographies identified in national archives, we have built a novel database covering the entire Danish labor force of physicians 1479-2000. Using this database, we will investigate the adoption of new ideas in networks of physicians and investigate whether historical circumstances in the physician labor market promoted or hindered the spread of ideas to the benefit of the population.
Discussion 2
Presenter: Jens Bjerring-Hansen
Title: Making Sense of 900 Novels - An Introduction to the MeMo and MiMe Projects
Abstract:
Jens Bjerring-Hansen is an associate professor at UCPH working with Scandinavian literature. He is the leader of the ongoing research project, MeMo – Measuring Modernity: Literary and Social Change in Scandinavia 1870-1900. In the presentation he will address the possibilities–and intricacies–of capturing literary and social trends in a large corpus of novels, inaccessible for a human reader, as well of making use of language models for analytical purposes when working with low-resource language data.