Exploring human behaviour in interdisciplinary learning environments

Ali Fisher

•History, •American Studies, •Public Diplomacy,•Counter terrorism, •Public health

Fields:

Is it possible to [ ... ]?

The most important phrase for using big data in social science:

• The Big Data era is more than the size, • Getting a birds eye view of data,• Network Analysis,• Examples, • Getting started,

The open source JihadThe ‘big’ in big data

Bigger is not necessarily better

No need for unsupervised digital landfill (Matt Asay)

a)Does not need to be big.

b)What is big now, won’t be in a couple of years.

c)It has to be appropriate to the task.

A birds-eye-view of human networks

• Interviews

•Letters and archives

• WWII SIGINT (e.g. from Bletchley Park)

• Familial ties in Renaissance Florence

• Eurovision voting

• Transmission of disease

• ENRON email trail

• Online communities

Example: Open source relational data

66 important Jihadist accounts on Twitter

Tracking Response

Information sharing network over timehttp://bit.ly/GZ43H8

Example: Open source relational data (part 2)

#Neda

#GR88

#HelpIranElection

The opportunity in the era of big data comes not from drowning in a sea of data but navigating the most useful ways to derive insight and develop innovative strategies from that data.

The easy availability of tools through which to analyse data is creating many exciting opportunities for the digital humanities to explore the available data in new interdisciplinary methods which compliment existing approaches.

Getting into what can be loosely termed big data does not have to come with a big price tag, until users have begun to develop fairly large-scale projects.

GDELT

Opportunity to study events

over time.

AQ activity over last 10 years

Elections

Geography of news coverage

Network of news makers ‘the

global conversation’

Getting started:

• Work in interdisciplinary teams

• Become familiar with approaches via small scale experiments (getting started is often the hardest part)

• Clarity on ethics.

• Ask is it possible to [ ... ]?