SODAS Data Discussion w/ Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Kristin Anabel Eggeling & Kelton Ray Minor
Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), is pleased to announce that we are continuing with SODAS Data Discussions this spring.
SODAS aspirers to be a resource for all students and researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We therefor invite researchers across the faculty to present ongoing research projects, project applications or just a loose idea that relates to the subject of social data science.
Every month two researchers will present their work. The rules are simple: short research 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.
We are going to kick off the spring semester with three presenters. The first work to be presented is by Professor in Political Science, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, and Postdoc at the Department of Political Science, Kristin Anabel Eggeling. They are followed by PhD at the Department of Economics and SODAS, Kelton Ray Minor.
Kelton Ray Minor: Nocturnal Warming and Human Behavior
Nighttime air temperatures are rising globally compared to local historical averages. Far more is known about heat effects on daytime human activity compared to nocturnal behavior. Here we link millions of multi-night activity measurements from commercial wearable devices spanning 68 countries to local daily meteorological data from 2015 to 2017. Rising temperatures alter human rest. Coupling historical behavioral measurements with output from global climate models, we project behavioral impacts into the future. Our findings are relevant for adaptation policy and planning, and indicate a specific behavioral pathway through which rising temperatures impact global public health and downstream behaviors.
Rebecca Adler-Nissen & Kristin Anabel Eggeling: Tweeting Diplomacy: Why We Need a Practice Approach in Social Data Science
What happens when a diplomat tweets? The increasing activity of diplomats and heads of state on social media platforms such as Twitter has led scholars to argue that diplomacy, one of the fundamental institutions of global politics, has ‘gone digital’. Much of this literature argues that digital media make state-to-state interactions more public and transparent, thus rendering back-room negotiations and stiff diplomatic protocol increasingly obsolete. Investigating these dynamics with and among European Union diplomats in Brussels, however, we find that local interpretations and use patterns of social media platforms differ and diverge considerably. While some practitioners embrace new communication tools as outlets to build their profiles as competent negotiators, others contemplate fatigue with constant communication, information overflow and breaches of confidentiality. Our ambition with this paper is to assess how digital practices like tweeting become part of the diplomatic repertoire. To do so, we draw practice theory, with its sensitivity to lived experience, practical doings, and material mediation, into social data science and its emphasis on ‘big [diplomatic] data’. What we need, we argue, is not social-data science, but social data-science: we need to treat data-science as a social science, and digital data as social data. Similar to Geertz’s wink or Barthes’ image, digital data points are polysemous, their meaning(s) depend on the processes and contexts of their production, as well as their social (including academic) interpretation. Unpacking the social in social data science through a practice-lens is promising, as it helps overcome a problematic dichotomy: that of the separateness of the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’, the ‘digital’ and the ‘analogue’ world. This move is both theoretical and methodological. First, it shows how, sociologically speaking, an instance like a diplomatic tweet does not exist independently from the contexts that produce it. Second, overcoming such binaries requires a research strategy that pays equal attention to what is happening both on diplomats’ twitter accounts and behind the phone screens that feed them.
The SODAS Data Discussion will take place at SODAS in building 1, 2ndfloor, room 26 (1.2.26) of the CSS Campus, University of Copenhagen, from 11.00 am to 12.00 noon.
If you have questions or want to know more, please write Sophie Smitt Sindrup Grønning at sophie.groenning@sodas.ku.dk.