Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: social media (Page 1 of 4)

Ask Canada – a new RSC College Interdisciplinary Research Group

When nominated into the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, one is asked to say how they will contribute to the College. During my nomination I pitched an idea for a new Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) on quantitative social science research policy and data infrastructure (including survey and social media methods). With the support of a few fellow members (Mark Stoddart, Karen Foster and Elizabeth Dubois) that IRG has just been provisionally approved. Now we are looking for additional members, and writing a funding application to staff some empirical work to support it. Please get in touch with me if you are an RSC College member who is interested to hear more.  A brief description follows:

Ask Canada: Toward robust data infrastructure and policy settings for quantitative social science in Canada

The landscape of quantitative social science research methods in Canada is a chaotic mix of practices and proxies both poorly understood at a system level and poorly equipped to support replicable research. This includes inadequate social science data infrastructure, inattention to policy settings to support empirical methods, and typically (bar a few fee-for-service labs) small, atomized academic teams that experience significant transaction costs in using them. Declining survey response rates drive many to work with polling firms or online modes of distribution that may compromise data quality and generalizability of insight. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science highlights the need to “[invest] in open science infrastructures and services”, but there is an ongoing tension globally—recognized by SDG 16 in relation to strong institutions—between high-quality, inclusive and representative data to inform decision-making and adequate protection of privacy. Open government initiatives are improving in line with global initiatives for default-open practices but Canada has thus far been focused on data repositories and access to government data and research, rather than supporting academic-led research. In fact, academic research is explicitly prohibited from accessing some resources (e.g. electoral rolls) that in comparable jurisdictions are available to their social scientists upon application. A piecemeal set of alliances and networks exist in Canada to support various aspects of social science but leave gaps in the support of quantitative social methods. This IRG will undertake literature review, expert methods, workshops and/or public surveys. By its end we will synthesize the state of quantitative social science in Canada, widely mobilize knowledge about best practices and trade-offs, and make recommendations for social science data infrastructure and public policy to foster quantitative social science research for the public interest.

New paper: social media methods for SIA

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.

New culturomics paper mapping CES using Instagram

Figure 2 process flowchart of the new Zhao et al. paper in Marine Policy

Another nice lab output this week in Marine Policy led by Qiqi Zhao, a China Scholarship Council visiting PhD student in my lab last year, including a bunch of other lab-affiliated students as co-authors: Modelling cultural ecosystem services in agricultural dykelands and tidal wetlands to inform coastal infrastructure decisions: a social media data approach. It is a bit of a companion piece to the Chen et al (2020) piece in Ocean and Coastal Management, as it uses the same Instagram dataset collected for every dykeland area in Nova Scotia back in 2018, but in a very different way. Chen et al. took a very qualitative ‘small data’ approach to the dataset, analyzing the photographs (and accounts) only of posts that included the words dyke*/dike*/wetland/marsh in the captions. Zhao et al. used a ‘big data’ text mining approach, extracting and associating bi-grams (two-word strings) from geolocated post captions to particular cultural ecosystem services (CES), modelling those CES using SolVES and comparing (as with Chen et al.) dykeland and wetland services. Whereas Chen et al. only found direct mentions of freshwater marshes (specifically Miner’s Marsh), in Zhao et al. we leveraged the coordinates to locate those geolocated to tidal wetland sites.  This will help us better understand the tradeoffs associated with climate change-driven adaptations of the dykeland system in the Bay of Fundy, the focus of NSERC ResNet Landscape 1.

Mehrnoosh’s defense

Mehrnoosh Mohammadi defending her MES thesis on Dec 3, 2021, online.

Mehrnoosh Mohammadi defending her MES thesis on Dec 3, 2021, online.

Proud to see Mehrnoosh Mohammadi ably defend her MES about energy infrastructure in vineyards on Friday, starting with a strong presentation of the mixed methods and findings, followed by questions from her committee and examiner and an in camera deliberation. I’ve never seen so many guests at a defense; Mehrnoosh had many friends and family calling in from near and far to support her, as well as a few students and other scholars.  My SRES colleague Dr. Michelle Adams was an excellent examiner, bringing lots of ideas from her work at the interface of sustainability and business, and my former postdoc Dr. H. M. Tuihedur Rahman provided wonderful support as committee member and stats expert. Dr. Heather Cray chaired it in record time. The work was funded by SSHRC, thanks to an IDG led by Dr. Kirby Calvert, a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship, and a Parya Scholarship. Thanks to all who helped it happen, and of course congratulations to Mehrnoosh.

Mehrnoosh’s poster award at Landscape 2021

Mehrnoosh (lower right) and two other recipients of the Landscape 2021 poster award at the online award ceremony.

Mehrnoosh (lower right) and two other recipients of the Landscape 2021 poster award at the online award ceremony.

Congratulations to Mehrnoosh Mohammadi, who won one of three poster awards at this week’s Landscape 2021 meeting in Europe (remotely), which is an international event focuses on sustainable agriculture through diversity and multifunctionality. On top of a certificate, this award will fund her to attend the next meeting in 2024. Mehrnoosh is in the final stages of her MES here in SRES, and her poster covers the first paper planned from her thesis, Terroir as an Ecosystem Service in Vineyard Landscapes: A Social Media Approach, which combines thematic coding, hierarchical cluster analysis and innovative collage visualization methods (to balance concerns of copyright and privacy online). Her work is funded by the Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarships and funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Kirby Calvert, PI) for a project concerned with integrating renewable energy into vineyard landscapes. Her next paper also uses Instagram but explores the impact of wind farms and solar panels on vineyard visitors, using more clever methods such as photo editing and saliency mapping.

Mehrnoosh Mohammadi's award-winning poster at Landscape 2021

Mehrnoosh Mohammadi’s award-winning poster at Landscape 2021

 

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