Schedule of Events

Mini-conference will take place on November 7, 2014 from 8:00am-5:00pm. All events held in Wisconsin Idea Room (159) in the School of Education unless otherwise indicated.

Morning Session

8:00am-8:30am

Coffee

8:40am-9:50am

Session 1

Patrick Ball: "Selection Bias and the Measurement of Mass Killing in Political Violence."

9:50am-10:00am

Coffee Break

10:00am-11:10am

Session 2

Philip Schrodt: "Technical Political Forecasting."

11:10am-11:45am

Roundtable

Jessica Weeks, moderator

Chris Wells, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, guest participant

  • What are particularly critical programming environments and languages for you?
  • Is the storage/data warehousing vs. analysis distinction disappearing?
  • How much can be done by a lone researcher and how do you structure collaborative teams?
  • What sorts of skills should social scientists consider investing in? What would a good collaborative team look like?
  • What are the security concerns that we should look out for, both in our work and in communicating with collaborators?
  • What are we likely to see going forward?

11:45am-12:30pm

Break Out Sessions

Note: One breakout session will be held in 211 North Hall.

  • with Phil Schrodt on "Open distributed collaborative data development with the Open Event Data Alliance."
    This session will discuss the various elements of the open-source EL:DIABLO near-real-time event data system (https://openeventdata.github.io/) and the current status of institutionalizing this through an organization similar to the data consortia found in many other "big data" fields.
  • with Patrick Ball on "Workflow Foundations"
    How to build a big project that you can read

12:30pm-1:30pm

Lunch

Afternoon Session

1:30pm-2:40pm

Session 3

Chad Hazlett, "Forecasting Mass Atrocities using Combined Structural and Events Data: Some Initial Findings."

2:40-2:50pm

Coffee Break

2:50pm-4:00pm

Session 4

Jennifer Alix-Garcia & Volker Radeloff, "Remote Sensing, Local and displaced land-use change in the Nagorno-Karabakh and Darfur conflicts."

4:00pm-4:45pm:

Final Roundtable

Jonathan Renshon, moderator

  • Who are the audiences for these projects?
  • Interfacing with government and quasi-governmental agencies using these data and tools
  • Communicating effectively with non-technical audiences (visualization, etc.)
  • Where is this heading in the future?

4:45pm-4:50pm

Closing remarks

5:00pm-6:30pm

Reception at University Club

7:30pm

Dinner for invited guests.