The NSF put out a call for white papers proposing new research directions in the social sciences a few months back. The proposals are “now available for general reading”:http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/all.cfm. Sean Aday, Marc Lynch, Cosma Shalizi, John Sides and I have one calling for the development of “New Data Analysis Techniques to Understand Information Flows”:http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/submission_detail.cfm?upld_id=200 (it is listed under my name – but only because I was the one who uploaded the final version to the NSF website).
bq. Information flows motivate key questions in the major social sciences. Yet scholars have had great difficulties in studying them directly. The movement of social activity to the Internet means that it is now possible to study information flows directly in a much more systematic fashion than before – data on many forms of social interaction is readily available in machine-readable format. Yet properly studying this new data will require new tools and new techniques. This White Paper proposes a two-stage program to develop new tools in conjunction with pilot initiatives studying information flows, and then apply them more broadly. It then outlines how these methods and data might be applied to three major problems spanning different social sciences – collective cognition, frames and mobilization, and political polarization – and concludes by discussing the policy benefits of better analysis.