Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Category: Methods (Page 1 of 17)

Australia fieldwork

June 17, 2024 /

I have been in Australia for just over two weeks now, revisiting livestock producers I worked with during my postdoctoral fellowship in 2008-2010. I was able to reach just over a third of the original participants, and I have been visiting them on their properties to identify the sites of the photos they took back in 2008, and recapture the same photos. It is fun work, like a treasure hunt. Some landscape changes are subtle in that 15+ years, and some are not (like the 66-turbine Rye Park wind farm; see below – you’ll need to zoom in). Thanks to the ANU Sustainable Farms team for the use of their field vehicle, and to these wonderful farmers for offering so much of their time and good humour.

The Rye Park wind farm at sunset

New research note on understanding sense of place

June 6, 2024 /

Figure 1 in Cotton et al. 2024, explaining the process

Visiting PhD student Isabel Cotton joined my team and the ResNet project for 3 months last year,  from her home unit at the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, and recently published a methods-oriented research note on that work in Journal of Environmental Psychology. The paper, Comparing thematic and search term-based coding in understanding sense of place in survey research, shows the result of exploratory work we did with Bangor University linguistic scholar Thora Tenbrink that took a qualitative approach by contrast with most survey-based assessments of sense of place. We compared the results of inductive and search-term-based coding of a free-text survey question on a survey of Minas Basin house residents asking them to, “Please describe [their] local area, in terms of what it means to [them] personally and how [they] use it”. The two sets of categories varied in their correlation, with more tangible themes like recreation/experience, relational/family and cultural heritage/history the strongest across the methods, compared with less comparable themes about restorative environments and small-town identity. What was particularly interesting, however, was that it was possible using word clouds to identify new terms to allow the search-term approach to improve its performance significantly (for instance recreation went from 0.75 to 0.96 correlation by adding only one term, exercise; see above).

New paper on social media data access for the public good

May 30, 2024 /

Congratulations to Yan Chen, whose first PhD paper is published (open access) today in Frontiers in Big Data, titled From theory to practice: Insights and hurdles in collecting social media data for social science research. She started her PhD in 2018, the year of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and this paper is a perspective piece that documents her challenges of data access for her PhD, which took her through eight different options before finding one that worked (enough). This was in stark contrast to Instagram data collection for her Master’s several years before, for which she used the academic tool Netlytic. The closing of APIs starting in 2018 did not make people safer, it just concentrated the data in a smaller set of (commercial) hands. This paper advocates for a stronger role for government and other regulators in ensuring access to social media for public good research.

Coastal reports and coverage

November 23, 2023 /

Two things are out from the lab this week on topics coastal.

Keahna Margeson, IDPhD student and 2023 OpenThink cohort member, had a commentary published in the Conversation called Let coastlines be coastlines: how nature-based approaches can protect Canada’s coasts. It is a great read!

The release of the report on last year’s scenario planning workshop for the Bay of Fundy coast was covered in DalNews. The report, Envisioning Environmental Futures for the Tidal Wetlands and Dykelands of the Bay of Fundy, is led by Elson Galang, the PhD student at McGill who led the workshop, but with lots of lab folks in the mix, including Keahna, Lara Cornejo, and Polly Nguyen.

Two reports have also been uploaded to Borealis based on ResNet work by team members. These works set strong groundwork for others to build on.

New paper: social media methods for SIA

November 3, 2023 /

Synthesis figure in the new Current Sociology paper showing sample workflows within a range of possibilities.

This week a new open access paper came out in a special issue (monograph) of Current Sociology about Social Impact Assessment. The special issue was led by Guadalupe Ortiz and Antonio Aledo, and their introductory essay is worth a read, as is Frank Vanclay’s epilogue, reflecting on 50 years of SIA and asking “is it still fit for purpose?”. Our offering, Social media and social impact assessment: Evolving methods in a shifting context, reflects on a decade of research using mostly Instagram to understand the social impacts of developments such as hydroelectricity, wind energy and coastal dyke realignment. The above demonstrates the current state of the art in terms of workflows, and shows how several of our studies have navigated those options. The paper also talks about the challenges, practical and ethical, of using social media datasets, and calls for government support in securing ongoing access for the purposes of public good research, a topic also recently argued by Ethan Zuckerman in Prospect Magazine. Most of the work synthesized in this paper has been published elsewhere, except the brilliant work that Mehrnoosh Mohammadi did on developing a collage approach to communicating common features in social media images to protect both copyright and privacy concerns (see below). This is a method we advocated back in 2017 and it is wonderful to see it in action.

A collage by Mehrnoosh Mohammadi of 16 photos captured in NS vineyards and posted on Instagram, showing seasonal change from left to right.

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