Doctoral student workshop: Developing Best Practices for Using Digital Tools to Study Human Behavior in Online Environments

A doctoral student workshop will be held at Northwestern University, August 18th-20th, on methodological issues in the study of human behavior online. For best consideration, applications from doctoral students in the beginning stages of their dissertation work are due by May 29th. An excerpt from the call for participation follows, or read the full call for participation from Northwestern. (Hat tip: Sarita Yardi / Twitter)

We invite doctoral students who study human behavior in digital environments, and who are at the beginning stages of their dissertation work, to apply to a workshop focusing on methodological issues in this kind of research.

When: August 18-20, 2013
Where: Evanston, Illinois, USA (just north of Chicago)
Cost: None, the workshop will cover participants’ lodging and meals, and in most cases the full cost of their travel
Host: Web Use Project, School of Communication, Northwestern University

The goal of the workshop is to bring together about a dozen junior and half-a-dozen senior scholars to discuss methodological best practices for the in-depth study of human behavior in digital environments. So-called “big data” offer lots of opportunities to study the social world, but may miss insights that methods such as in-person observations and interviews can discover. Bringing different types of data and methods together can help address challenges, such as biased data sets, and can help glean new insights. Workshop participants will discuss tools that exist and tools that need to be developed for sharable, sustainable, and scalable approaches to collecting, coding, and analyzing comparable data about human behavior in digital environments.