Features

This year’s Open House will focus on introducing the range of social research “toolkits”. Sometimes a researcher really focuses on one toolkit (like Qualitative Methods) and builds deep expertise with one or more tools inside (interviews, ethnography, and content analysis among them), Other times it’s useful to borrow from other toolkits, or use entirely different types of tools together to analyze an issue. Each session of the open house will introduce one of six social research toolkits and the range of methods inside them, then engage with your thoughts and questions. Feel free to come for one or many sessions. Have we sparked your interest?

Brighter Spark has been working quietly over the last year with a few partners and now will be expanding its work both in the community and with other researchers. It will bridge the gap between academia and the community, by providing research support to groups working on real world issues. In this article, we outline exciting projects in our new launch.

Using the tools of bibliometrics, you can document the influence of your own publications, the work of those scholars you are associated with or the types of articles a particular journal publishes. Dr. Fei Yu, a health technology informatics librarian at the University of North Carolina is very excited about all that bibliometrics can reveal, and wants you to be too.

How does the way our government handles big data influence our daily lives? In a talk in our Productivity during Pandemic series, Laura Mahrenbach speaks about the “Emerging Powers and Big Data: Domestic Transformations and Global Power Shifts”. And boy, did it raise a lot of questions.

Each year, Spark decides on a topic that we think is really important to innovation in social research and we find the most amazing thinkers and doers we can, from all over the world, to offer related workshops. Learn more about our the relevance of research and how it can be effectively translated to the public in this article.

If you will be conducting interviews, the Productivity during Pandemic talk “Better Interview Questions” with Allison Van can help you with the first step: figuring out your questions.