Seminar on Reproducibility & Open Research — Dr Laura Nelson, “Data Science with Meaning: Reproducibility and Replicability in the Interpretative Social Sciences”

Multi-disciplinary seminar series on Reproducibility and Open Research practices. All very welcome!

April 24: Dr Laura Nelson, Northwestern University

“Data Science with Meaning: Reproducibility and Replicability in the Interpretive Social Sciences”

While reproducibility best-practices and tools developed in the natural sciences can be directly applied to many branches of the social sciences, these tools are often ill-suited for the specific type of research done in the interpretive social sciences. The interpretive social sciences acknowledge the importance of interpretation and meaning in behavior and the construction of the social world, but in line with science more generally, the goal is to understand this meaning in a way that is reproducible and intersubjectively valid. In this talk I will discuss how computational methods enable us to move the interpretive social sciences closer to fully transparent, reproducible, and open methods. Specifically, I will discuss a three-step methodological framework I call computational grounded theory. This approach combines the substantive knowledge and hermeneutic skills of trained researchers with the processing power and pattern recognition of computers, to produce a more methodologically rigorous, open, reproducible, but interpretive approach to the social sciences. I will demonstrate this framework via two empirical examples, historical feminist movements and the contemporary environmental movement, using the reproducibility tool Binder.