Bringing a whole new meaning to coding

Hi! I’m Neal, the fourth and final SOCIAM intern and this is my first blog post. Unlike the others, my undergraduate degree was in Modern Languages and Linguistics, so instead of coding programs, my responsibility is qualitative analysis – Known in social science circles as ‘coding’.

My current task is to sift through approximately 1,500 tweets with varying connections to the Zooniverse project, dividing them into tweets, retweets and tweets with mentions. Having done that, I get to read the tweet, give it a short description and a number of tags that can be used to divide the tweets into groups (“positive,” “negative,” and “neutral,” for example). It’s a fairly time consuming task, but it’s really interesting getting to see the different ways in which people tweet about different topics, even though they were presented with the same subject (the Zooniverse project) to begin with.

In between that, I’ve been classifying the 25 different Zooniverse projects, giving information such as the input type, output type, tasks and processes involved with each project, which has been a great opportunity to get to know the project itself.

My degree comes in handy in the strangest places…

What’s happening in my neighbourhood?

Hi this is Yuki. I am glad to be the second one to post! I was assigned to work towards developing Social Machine (SM) for crime. Currently I am conducting background research on existing crime SMs. How does a SM work for crimes? Here is an example:

http://www.police.uk/

You can search how and what kind of crime happened in specific locations. It provides a detailed description of the crimes. One is also able to view information for the particular area the crime was committed including the location of the police station, names of police officers, email addresses and in some cases even the telephone numbers of the officers.

We have arrived!

As this is the first post I should probably give a quick introduction. I am Anna, one of the interns working with the SOCIAM project this summer. Joining me are three other University of Southampton students: Gustavo, Yuki and Neal. We all have different skills and talents to bring to the projects and we are going to use this blog to share anything which we like, find interesting or think needs to be out there on the web.

Yesterday we got our bearings, ate pastries, and met Sir Nigel Shadbolt. We also played around with some fitness apps and gadgets. I have already spent £1.49 on a new heart rate monitoring app. This could become an expensive summer but I am excited about what we could all contribute to this project.

Pastry + Scales = Slightly Ironic