CISS and Spark! Partner to Support Four Social Science Research Projects
The Center for Innovation in Social Science and BU Spark! have partnered to bring together faculty and graduate student social scientists with data science students to generate cutting-edge new research. BU Spark!, led by director Ziba Cranmer, is a technology incubator and experiential learning lab for student-led computational and data driven projects at BU. The funded projects were presented at the BU’s Experiential Learning Expo on May 5 in the Center for Computing & Data Sciences.
This partnership is a one-year pilot, funded through gifts that support experiential learning initiatives in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). The funded research teams extend their gratitude to CAS Dean Stan Sclaroff, who initiated the pilot program. Read on to learn more about the funded research projects.
Japonica Brown-Saracino
(Professor of Sociology). Understanding the Use of Gentrification. This project examines the usage of the term “gentrification” across multiple U.S. newspapers. The team will work on this project during summer 2023, and will examine more than 20,000 articles across six newspapers to identify both traditional and non-traditional uses of the term. The team will use techniques like sentiment and location analyses, to do a rich and nuanced exploration of how people think about and talk about gentrification in contemporary U.S. society.
Randall P. Ellis
(Professor of Economics). Web Data Collection to Support Studies of Systemic Sexism, Racism, and Nationality Bias US Economics Departments. Dr. Ellis supervised a team of four master- and undergraduate-level computer science major students for the spring term 2023. This team created a rich faculty-year panel dataset for tracking economics faculty at 800 US colleges and universities, with a special focus on the top 100 highest-ranked departments that account for the majority of new PhDs in economics. Through an extensive process of data scraping and cleaning, the team created comprehensive directories that enable researchers to track changes in the composition of faculty over time in terms of gender, race, nationality, rank, and movement between universities. This new information supplement data previously collected within the economics department and provided essential information for a recently submitted grant proposal focused on developing policy interventions to reduce biased hiring and retention practices.
Meghann Lucy
(Doctoral candidate, Sociology). Hoarding Definition, Detection, and “Treatment” in Boston. The Spark! team created “clustering” algorithms to identify likely hoarding cases using inspectional services citations data, 311 reports of hoarding and eviction filings related to hoarding/extreme clutter. They used theses data along with detailed map to show the distribution of hoarding across Boston neighborhoods, highlighting associations between hoarding and the demographic composition of neighborhoods. The discovered that reports of hoarding do not necessarily result in inspectional services citations. For example, there are more 311 reports about hoarding in Dorchester, but more citations in the North End. There are also more evictions related to hoarding in Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End. Roxbury and Dorchester are lower-income neighborhoods with higher percentages of people of color than in many other Boston neighborhoods. Lucy will use these insights and the maps in her dissertation to better describe the sociodemographic and geographic distribution of hoarding cases in the Greater Boston area.
Ian Sue Wing (Professor of Earth and Environment) and Nicolas Schneider (doctoral candidate, earth and environment). Climate Change Effects on Urban Poor. This project investigates the potential effects of adapting to climate change in New York City, empirically modeling patterns of energy use in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) public housing developments in response to weather—particularly electricity consumption for cooling during periods of extreme heat. The Spark! team scraped NYCHA websites and press releases to understand climate adaptation among low-income urban residents. Although the NYCHA records of metered energy use at its buildings were difficult to access, the Spark! team creatively automated access to, and data retrieval from, NYCHA’s website using a software platform called Selenium. The resulting product is a tabular datafile that Schneider will use in the statistical analyses for his dissertation.
Congratulations and kudos to the investigators and the exemplary teams of students who carried out their projects!