Podcast on Computational Thinking

Director of SODAS, David Dreyer Lassen, and Professor at SODAS, Morten Axel Pedersen, participated in the second episode of the podcast series, Computational Thinking - To Think With Machines. They talk about how computational thinking can be used in social science and within the interdisciplinary research at SODAS. 

They explain how enormous amounts of data and new tools are now seriously affecting the way research is done both in social science and anthropology.

As an example, researchers at SODAS have tried to uncover what it takes for a party to be experienced as good - or vice versa, as boring. The researchers combined observations from a party at DTU with data from the participating students' smartphones. The smartphones could show who they were close to and who they communicated with on digital platforms while being at the party. 

Methods such as Machine Learning can thus help with both structuring data and finding patterns in data. But "old" skills  such as qualitative interviews and source criticism are still important and necessary. 

Note that the podcast is in Danish. Listen to the podcast here.