Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will speak Saturday at the 2015 Illinois Digital Humanities Symposium. Cosponsored by GSLIS, the symposium will bring together graduate students, faculty, and researchers from across campus to discuss current work and methodologies in digital humanities. Registration is free and open to anyone.
Diesner's talk, “Bringing Computational Social Science to the Real World: Impact Assessment of Issue-Focused Public Media,” will take place at 2:00 p.m. in 1000 Lincoln Hall.
Abstract: How can we capture the social impact of storytelling in a comprehensive, rigorous, and efficient fashion? How can we design for social change motivated by issue-focused public media products? Both philanthropic foundations and scientific organizations have recently started to reconsider the question of how to measure the impact of the work they are funding by going beyond narrowly defined, quantitative metrics. In collaboration with makers and sponsors of public interest media, we have developed, tested, and evaluated a computational approach to impact assessment that is grounded in social science theories. Our approach combines and leverages techniques from network analysis and natural language processes. The resulting methodology is being applied to data typically used in the digital humanities, i.e. large amounts of structured and unstructured text data from a variety of sources. In my talk, I will speak about our experience in working with practitioners on developing a practical and accurate solution to the given problem, lessons learned from a series of empirical studies, and scientific innovation resulting from this collaborative effort. For the purpose of this work, we have been developing ConText, a publicly available technology designed to help researchers and practitioners in the digital humanities and computational social sciences to construct different types of network data based on text data.
The symposium is hosted by the Scholarly Commons at the University Library and the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS). Additional cosponsors include the Graduate College, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication, and Department of English.