Tag Archives: hackathon

ASA Datathon: Call for Participation

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I’m really excited to officially announce the first annual pre-ASA datathon, taking place at Berkeley’s D-Lab on August 15-16, 2014.

The theme is “big cities, big data: big opportunity for computational social science,” the idea being looking at contemporary urban issues — especially housing challenges — using data gathered and made publicly available by cities including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Austin, Boston, Somerville, Seattle, etc.

The hacking will start at noon on August 15 and go until the next day. Sleeping is optional. We’ll have a presentation and judging session in the evening of August 16 in San Francisco, exact location TBD.

We’re working with several academic and industry partners to bring together tools and datasets which social scientists can use at the event. So stay tuned as that develops.

You can apply here and see the full call [PDF].

ALSO — Check out the CITASA Symposium the morning of the 15th (citasasymposium.info) before joining us at noon for the Datathon! There’ll be a number of great talks which will complement the hacking over at the D-Lab.

Hacking GDELT

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The Databasement

This weekend, I made it out to Penn State to participate in the GDELT hackathon, sponsored by the Big Data Social Science IGERT and held in the punnily-named Databasement. The hackathon brought together a lot of different groups — political scientists, industry contractors, computer and information scientists, geographers, and — of course — sociologists (I was one of two).

GDELT, as you may remember, a political events database with nearly  225 million events from 1979 to the present. Hackathon attendees had interests ranging from optimizing and normalizing the database, predicting violent conflict, and improving event data in general.

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ASA 2014 Hackathon – Are you in?

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UPDATE 2013-10-01: Nate Porter pointed out that the Hacker League page doesn’t let you sign up. For now, use this Google doc.

A lot of folks on Twitter during ASA this year were chatting about the possibility of a hackathon during ASA 2014 in San Francisco. The reasons for having a hackathon, I think, are myriad; here are some of the various “purposes” that myself and members of the computational sociology listserv have considered:

  • Incorporate computational methods into social science through teh h4x
  • Inspire participants to apply computational methods to common social science problems
  • Create an organizational nexus for computational sociology which makes it a vibrant and visible part of the discipline
  • Develop and foster social ties that strengthen the field and point to the value of non-traditional venues for collaboration
  • Create useful and interesting research products.
  • Solidify connections among sub-community of folks in/around sociology who have a set of skills/tools/interests in things computational
  • Increase visibility of that sub-community, partly by showcasing what can be done
  • To support claim that sociology has a role to play in computational social science and that computation has a role to play in sociology.
  • Connect folks already immersed in these skill areas with folks who are around the edges, curious, etc.
  • To actually impart some new skills/ideas to folks.
  • To actually produce something collectively useful.
  • To lay foundation for something that could grow in future years at ASA meetings or in ASA in general (e.g., a network of folks working with these tools).

I’m really excited about the prospect of this. Laura Norén, Christopher Weiss, and I have been plotting to make this thing a reality. Right now we’re trying to gauge how many people would come out to such an event.

If you have even a tiny inkling that you might come to the hackathon, sign up at the Hacker League page.