ISSR Spring Intensive Workshop | Practical Web and Text Scraping | Matthew Denny

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 - 9:00am to 4:00pm
Wednesday, March 14, 2018 - 9:00am to Thursday, March 14, 2019 - 4:00pm
University of Massachusetts, Amherst | E20 Machmer Hall
In this two-day short course, participants will learn how to efficiently automate the process of collecting data from large numbers of websites and text files using R. This workshop will include a mini-unit on text processing in R, as well as a mini-unit on scraping Twitter using R.

ISSR Spring Intensive Workshop | Data Management in R | Matthew Denny

Monday, March 11, 2019 - 9:00am to 4:00pm
Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - 9:00am to 4:00pm
University of Massachusetts, Amherst | E20 Machmer Hall
In this two-day short course, participants will be introduced to core data management concepts and techniques using the R programming language. By the end of the workshop, participants should possess the basic skills necessary to perform most data management tasks they are likely to encounter over the course of a research project intended for publication as a scholarly journal article.

Where We Stand and What We See | Four Views on Social Location in the Social Sciences

A full house packed the ISSR lab for the first event in ISSR’s seminar series on Social Science and Social Location. The central question of this panel was “How does where we stand affect what we see, and what we can know as scholars?” Responses came in the form of four thought-provoking expositions on the politics of creating social science that reflects non-traditional academic origins, asks questions that the mainstream is not asking, honors histories and standpoints that have traditionally been excluded from scientific discourses, and claims a vital and legitimate – if fiercely challenged – place in the scientific enterprise. 

Faculty Survey | NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant

This fall, UMass Amherst was awarded a National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant to develop systemic and sustainable approaches to advance gender equity (including dynamics at the intersection of race and gender) and promote gender equity in ways that involve women and men.  In order to inform our efforts, we need to hear from you. 

ISSR Workshop | Improving Data Access and Reproducibility

Thursday, December 6, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
E20 Machmer Hall | UMass Amherst
What kinds of repositories are out there for social scientists, for qualitative or quantitative data that might be useful in their own research? How can we improve on the standards of reproducibility in our research? This workshop introduces a variety of resources available to social scientists to achieve both aims.

No Coincidence: the Coterminous Rise of Right-Wing Populism and Superfluous Populations

On 17 October, David Snow, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine engaged a packed house at the ISSR lab. Snow lectured on the relationship between right-wing populism and the construction of superfluous populations, drawing from his recent chapter on the topic in Mackert et al’s edited volume Populism and the Crisis of Democracy (Routledge, 2018).

Are We Connecting Online? Paul DiMaggio Presents a Theory-Driven Approach to Understanding Sustained Interaction in Online Forums

How do longstanding theories of social interaction hold up when communication shifts from in-person to online interaction? And how can novel research methods, applied by collaborative teams of social scientists and computer scientists to new forms of online data, help us re-imagine the mechanisms driving social life?

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