Open research in social sciences
Recently I had the chance to consider good examples of open research in social sciences. Once again, with thanks to the various open research communities I'm a part of and in the interests of my enquiry taking the form of open research, here are some relevant resources/examples. On a meta level, it was interesting what people suggested, which says something about their perspectives on the matter.
From The Turing Way
Anne reminded me the importance of recognising/avoiding what I would call the trap of “performative objectivity”, i.e.:
...traditional 'social science' (which can often fall prey to the same ideas of being 'objective' and 'removed' from the communities they are studying or working with, in their desire to be more aligned with the hard as opposed to 'soft' sciences)
This then reminded me of the excellent book Data Feminism:
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/
This book was a great read, and contains — among other things — great examples of projects which avoid that trap, and creative ways to share and conceptualise “data”.
With that in mind, here's a good example of community-led research:
https://grassrootsjusticenetwork.org/resources/community-action-guide-on-community-led-research/
Engaged and public anthropology can be creative in its outputs (as opposed to “traditional” academic outputs), such as an open city documentary festival:
https://opencitylondon.com/about-us/
Or a set of walking tours:
https://open-city.org.uk/events
Anne also mentioned that Paz Bernaldo from Open Life Sciences and Beth Duckles from “organisational mycology” (so curious what this term means!) may have insights, too.
Beth later responded with some very useful examples, saying that:
...participant action research (PAR) and community based participatory research (CBPR) are another set of methodological approaches that seeks to reconsider subject/object of the research by including the folks “being studied” in the research leadership, essentially trying to lessen the power inequalities and make the research more community led. It comes out of a social justice lens, particularly Paolo Friere's work.
One of which is a piece of open participatory research that makes “the research process, data collection and analysis open to those who were able and interested in being a part of the process”:
https://zenodo.org/records/8015576
There are also online repositories for publishing open social science outputs, such as SOCARXIV and SOAR:
Beth also linked to a discussion about “open social science”:
And Angela Okune worked for a long time with a community in Kenya, published on the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE: pronounced “peace”):
Anne also curated a list of tools for social science researchers:
https://open-source-social-science.github.io
Even though it's a list of tools, tools affect the questions we could ask and I think Anne's list can serve as an inspiration for what kinds of open research one could do!
From FORRT
Priya reminded me of the wonderful work she and others at the UK Reproducibility Network did to collate examples of open research across disciplines:
https://www.ukrn.org/disciplines/
https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3r8hb
Aleksandra shared a platform her lab established to share psychological methods/tools translated into Serbian. To me, this is a great example not because it's about psychology research, but because that it's a community effort at translation, making resources accessible to a different audience:
https://www.repopsi.f.bg.ac.rs/en/
Flavio shared a great paper about “Teaching open and reproducible scholarship: a critical review of the evidence base for current pedagogical methods and their outcomes”. An important reminder that pedagogy/teaching is a key component of open research:
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221255
Also, FORRT resources on adopting open research and replication:
https://forrt.org/replication-hub/
On a more meta level, Flavio noted that FORRT itself might be a good social sciences example of people coming together as a community to build something.
From NASA TOPS
Christine shared two very cool resources.
SEEKCommons, which seeks to promote “the 'commons' in science and technology with an emphasis on collaborative socio-environmental research”:
https://seekcommons.org/about.html
And the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), which “provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community”:
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/about/
Citizen science
There's also lots of work in the citizen/community science circles that may be good examples of open research in social sciences.
For example, the classic story I always tell is about Public Lab:
Where their famous open source balloon mapping kit — originally for mapping the spread of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill — was adapted by those in the Bourj Al Shamali refugee camp to see their urban space from above for the first time:
https://placesjournal.org/article/camp-code/
The story in this article is an inspiring example of open research. And, the article itself is open research by Claudia Martinez Mansell, sharing her work in a public way.
Acknowledgements
In alphabetical order.
The Turing Way
Anne Lee Steele, Beth Duckles
Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT)
Aleksandra Lazić, Flavio Azevedo, Priya Silverstein
NASA TOPS community
Christine Kirkpatrick
Unless otherwise stated, all original content in this post is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license
