What is Bad Hessian?

Bad Hessian is a collaborative computational social science blog, for a very inclusive definition of “computational social science.” We welcome a range of articles, from the empirical to the theoretical, to those containing embedded code and graphs to those which deal with issues of epistemology and critiques of “big data” approaches. Authors are welcome from academia, industry, non-profits, and government. We want our authorship to include folks from the social sciences, computer sciences, informatics, science and technology studies, and digital humanities. Our vision for the blog is to provide a place for discussion to the whole myriad of voices which are in the computational social science and data science communities.

Post Description

Posts should be short and sweet — something on the order of 500-1000 words. The ideal empirical or code-focused post should have something like 500-700 words, 1-2 graphs, and 1-2 code blocks. The purely theoretical or thinkpiece-type article can be longer. This should keep your time commitment to a reasonable level. Hopefully you have most of the code or graphs just lying around, and you can write some prose around them. If the impulse strikes you for a more involved article, we can run it over the course of several different posts. But the idea is to simply write about the things that happen to be on your mind or the focus of your research at the time.

What is the best format for writing posts?

You can write the post in Markdown, HTML, or Microsoft Word formats. Please, no PDFs or LaTeX. If you have any equations, please include them in LaTeX notation. Images should be in JPG or PNG formats. Code blocks can be formatted as a different font and will be inserted using our WordPress code plugin. You can also use GitHub/Bitbucket embeddedable code snippets.

How do I submit something?

Send an email to alex.hanna@gmail.com with a short description of what you’d like to write.

Looking forward to your posts!