Webinar recording and Q&A: Software tools in social science and humanities research

At the end of last year, Dr. Daniela Duca (Product Manager for SAGE Ocean), hosted a webinar to discuss findings from our white paper on The Ecosystem of Technologies for Social Science Research. Daniela discussed who is developing research tools, who supports and funds them, the challenges they are facing and other trends from more than 400 tools in this space.

In this blog, we share a recording of the webinar and Daniela also answers listeners’ questions that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar. Sign up below to watch the recording and click on the questions below to see Daniela’s answers.

Where can I find the full white paper, the list of 400+ tools, and the other data mentioned on the webinar

You can download the full white paper here. You can get the list of the tools and other data collected when writing the white paper on our GitHub page.

400+ research tools is a lot! Do you think some might be duplicated?

Indeed, 400 is a lot, and to be honest the more we look into different areas, the more tools we find. So I feel there are at least half as many that we haven’t listed here. For example, I am now looking at tools and software for text mining, and have at least 30 more to add. We’ve tried our best to avoid duplicates, but if you find any, do give us a shout.

Does tool development and use seem similar across disciplines, or are there particular disciplines leading in this?

In our experience, the use of tools differs from project to project, and so it is quite hard to generalize across disciplines. Though you will find that there are research groups that tend to specialize in using network graphs, and others lean towards text mining and sentiment analysis, even though they might start with a similar dataset.

In terms of development, and particularly for tools coming out of the social sciences, there are a few groups that are leading. For example, have a look at the gateway of SoBigData, it contains a long list of tools and workflows even, and the partners aim to maintain these for the longer term. Other labs that develop tools for social sciences are Ryerson University’s Social Media Lab, the Digital Methods Initiative.

If I absolutely had to choose one discipline that may be leading in terms of the development of tools, I would say linguistics and computational linguistics.

I’m concerned that if I adopt one of the newer, non-commercial cloud based systems for a project that it will disappear or run out of funding/institution support before I finish the project. Is there a reliable source of info on the life-cycle or viability or reviews of these tools?

That is the most pertinent question, and something that many struggle with, including us. To my knowledge, there is no hard and fast way to forecast whether a tool will survive or be forgotten. It very much depends on a combination of things - how good the team is and how fast they can deliver, how well the solution solves a problem and how many people have this problem, and of course how much money they have or can make to maintain the tool. These are actually all things we consider when we fund the development of software as well, or even any solutions we want to build.

It is quite different when you are looking to use a tool for your project, and you want to make sure you don’t end up in a position where you cannot continue as planned. It will always be a risk, and to diminish this risk, [for a non-commercial cloud based system] it’s important to look at the group or community of people that are contributing to its maintenance.

Some questions you can ask are:

How large is this group?

Does it look like it’s growing?

Do they seem committed?

Maybe there is a governance model?

Is this system supported by a lab or a consortia?

How committed are they?

If nobody patches the system, and potentially it’s open source, could I or my team undertake that task?

Are there many users?

You can always get in touch with the people behind the system you are interested.

Have you encountered much activity from librarians or libraries supporting academics with this exploding field of tools?

We’ve met several librarians that are quite active and try to develop workshops and short trainings for some of these tools. The sessions vary, anything from introductory to quite advanced use of a tool, especially if the tool can help explore the collections in more depth. There is also a growing number of people across the university that may be identified as research technologists (a role similar to learning technologist, but focused on research tools and software to support the research process).

These are either in the library, or in IT, or another research support structure (like the Research & Innovation departments) and are quite familiar with a number of tools and run trainings, and can be called out for advice, especially around research data management tools and live data handling, some data analysis and text and data mining.

We’ve also seen students and academics of all stages (and sometimes even across a few different departments, like social sciences with the NLP groups) coming together in ‘working groups’ to discuss, share and learn from each other the use of different tools.

Have you looked at how well a tool provides information on how to use it or how user-friendly it is? If so, did you find this information to be good/helpful and was it common?

The short answer is no, we have not looked at the user friendliness of these different tools in a more robust way.

I can say that, anecdotally, as I tested some of the tools, I would form an opinion on whether it is easy for me to navigate and understand what it is that they do or what kind of analysis they support. That is, potentially, a very good next area for us to look into. If you are developing software, and you want to know whether the type of documentation and information you provide is good enough, I would start with the Software Sustainability Institute guide, and even get them to do a review for you.

Have you come across any tools that were designed to synchronize or provide a single time signature when using multiple tools at once (multiple physiological tools, audio/video recording etc.)?

I did not come across a tool like this, but will keep my eyes out.

Are there many multilingual tools?

Yes, there are multilingual tools, though I don’t have enough data right now to quantify that. For example, all the audio transcription tools support at least 10 languages. The text mining tools, especially those out of Europe cover more than just English.

Is SPSS still considered the most effective statistical package in the social sciences and humanities?

It’s hard to say. SPSS is possibly one of the most commonly taught statistical packages in the social sciences, although R may be taking over. In a few conversations with digital humanists, they mentioned that R and increasingly python are being taught at undergraduate and master levels. Jamovi is a pretty neat interface for doing advanced statistics in R, in a more intuitive way.

In your opinion, what is the best free survey tool? Which survey tools allow you to include videos, pictures and music?

It really depends on your use case. I like Typeform, and with their free option you can include some images. So far, my understanding is that if you need anything more complex, like integrating music, playing and stopping, or videos, or games and other digital designs, you almost always need the paid-for versions. Though always check with your institution, they may already subscribe to some of these, as surveys are used across a number of faculties.

What is the significance of color on the survey tools slide?

No significance really, just to remind me which ones to speak about.

Are there any tools for analyzing images, especially for fine arts research?

Depends on how many images you want to analyze. For qualitative research, you can still use tools like NVIVO. If you are trying to do something at a larger scale, to identify patterns or cluster by similarity try zegami. If you are technically skilled you can use algorithms like OpenPose; if you are only looking to automatically extract basic metadata - you can start off with clarifai, alternatively you can build your own computer vision algorithm with tools that support that entire workflow like Labelbox.

Of course, you can always collaborate with someone like the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford, who also have a set of tools for image analysis.

What is the best free tool to capture real time voting of a group of people, possibly using their personal mobile phone or laptops?

Depends what type of voting you are looking to capture. Not on the list, but within our team we've used a basic tool called ideazboard. It's easy to add ideas and solutions as "postits", aggregate them where you need to, and then ask people to vote on them.

It's also worth checking allourideas.org from Matt Salganik and his team. This is a modified version of a survey tool, where you can both vote with your choice as well as add other answers.

Do you know any tools for field notes (for participatory observation method)?

Conseris, for example, was developed for a different use case, but can be used for field notes, especially if you want to collect those in a semi-structured way. OpenDataKit is fantastic, when you are collecting data in hard-to-reach environments, and it is also mobile friendly, while not requiring a network connection.

Of course, you can always use tools like Atlas.ti and NVIVO to organize and analyze your field notes, if you are able to work from your laptop. A number of researchers also use OneNote from Microsoft, Evernote or Bear (if you want to use markdown) which are also useful for writing and organizing your notes.

Did you come across tools specifically designed for anthropological (ethnographic) research?

Yes indeed we have. The most commonly used are tools like NVIVO, Atlas.ti, Dedoose. There is a tool called The Ethnograph, which has similar features.

Is there a tool to analyze the structure of a text? For example, telling me what is the main idea of a paragraph or the sentiment analysis by paragraphs or sections of a text?

There are a number of tools to support these tasks. My understanding so far, is that you would need to break down your text by the units you would want to analyze. The easiest to use tool here that is also free would be Orange Text and Data Mining.This lets you gather the sentiment, model by topic, and a few other basic statistical analysis of text. For identifying the main idea of a paragraph or a document, you could use summarization tools like Scholarcy.

What is the best software for sentiment analysis where best equals most user-friendly?

That depends on the scale of the text you want to analyze. Voyant Tools are super easy to use and offer in-browser capabilities, and as an app, I would go for the free Orange Text and Data Mining. There are a variety of Twitter sentiment analysis tools, and most of them are user-friendly.

What is the difference between annotating text and qualitative analysis?

Qualitative analysis is the set of approaches to interpret and understand a wide range of materials; while text annotation is one of these approaches. In the context of the tools clusters, I used these two terms to designate the feature capability. Tools for qualitative analysis normally have more features and can support across a bigger part of the research process than annotation tools, which are built just for annotating the text and are not really useful for organizing and mapping the materials.

Did you take into account, or encounter, any tool that is specifically dedicated to the analysis of historical sources?

Yes, and the best place to start would be Pelagios, it’s a network of researchers studying historical places. They also develop tools and work on collaborative projects. Recogito, an annotation tool, is developed and supported by this community. While the outputs and questions you would ask when working with historical sources would differ, many tasks in the research process are quite similar across social sciences and humanities disciplines when working with text or other digitized materials. If you are looking for a tool to support with mapping, or analyzing images, or analyzing text, I would search based on task rather than the discipline, and I am sure you will find something that suits.

Approximately what proportion of UGs or PGs are permitted to graduate without having used a software tool for analysis?

That is a really good question, something that is hard to measure. Perhaps not as a requirement, but I find it really hard to believe there could be a student that has never used software to run some analysis. Everyone probably did a pivot table in excel at least once.

Do you recommend any scanning software tools to scan paper-based school surveys to replace data entry of pencil and paper survey at schools?

This is not an area we investigated, but I can see how tedious and time-wasting a task this is. I remember when I studied in the US, this process was relatively standardized. There were these cards that looked almost like punch cards and we had to color in the circles with a particular type of pencil. That was then just automatically scanned and graded. If your surveys have more than just multiple choice questions, that will require a different solution.

What would be the best suggestion to run experimental tasks on Android smart phones?

There are a number of software for running experiments, but unless I've missed it, I did not see any of them offer good enough UX for mobiles. There are some tools that enable data logging or collection, almost like live journaling that run on phones (like MindLogger), but most experiments are big screen bound at the moment. Give Volunteer Science a go.

Could you tell us a little more about software developed to collect experimental behavioural data (e.g. reaction time) versus survey-based or self-report studies or text analysis tools?

Those are 2 quite different methodologies, and of course depending on what you choose to do and what’s best for your research question, you can use the appropriate software. In some instances, you can set up a survey software to measure the completion rates and infer a reaction time from that, but that’s too indirect and may not give you good results. With most experiment tools you can also include some survey questions and collect that type of data.

Do you provide basic courses on data science, data mining and more?

Yes! Check out SAGE Campus; our suite of online data science courses for social scientists. Remember you get a 25% discount by using the code TOOLS25 at the checkout.