So what do you do once you have your data and want to analyze and present it in a useful and easy to understand way?  Today we do a roundup of some of the cool blogs out there doing work in these areas.

In the realm of social science research, Andrew Gelman is always very thoughtful and thorough in the ways that he displays his own complex data, and on his blog he often shares interesting data visualizations and data visualization tools from other sources as well.  He’s done some blogging for FiveThirtyEight as well, which has had some other nice visualizations too.

Gelman contributed to a book called Beautiful Data, along with Peter Norvig of Google (discussing natural language data), Brendan O’Connor of the AI and Social Science blog, and a number of other folks.  The bits I’ve read look pretty great — I can’t wait to read the whole thing.

In the realm of more playful and off-the-wall, the OKCupid blog has really interesting data analyses.  They have a large amount of data they’ve gathered from users of their dating site, and they regularly discuss on the blog how various opinions and priorities vary geographically, which demographics dates which, what kinds of communications get a response, and so on.

There are a number of cool websites that don’t address a particular topic, but instead apply clever information visualization techniques to a wide array of issues.  I particularly like Information is Beautiful, and have recently discovered Flowing Data (full of useful tutorials and tools!) and Infosthetics.  At the last blog, I would recommend checking out their visualization of Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you ever enjoyed those as a child.  (I did!)

Finally, there are Strange Maps, covering visualizations of everything from the useful to the whimsical to the imaginary, and GraphJam, which is just plain silly, but sometimes pretty great.

Today I follow up on the rest of the survey data I started analyzing in the last post.  We’ve gotten a number of new survey submissions since my last post; thanks to everyone for your data!  Since this post is a continuation of the last one, I’m going to keep analyzing the same set of responses from before — but the new responses don’t significantly change the results I’m presenting here, in any case.

Last time we talked about researchers’ specific needs in terms of experimental/research design.  This time, I’m going to cover the other aspects of running studies — participant recruitment and payment in particular.

» Continue reading “what researchers want, part 2″

We recently asked a bunch of researchers who work with human participants to tell us about their research needs.  (It’s not too late to give input!  Take our short survey here.)  We love data, and we know a lot of you also love data, so we wanted to share some of our results!

At the time of this analysis, we’ve had 72 complete or nearly complete survey responses, as well as many partial responses.  The breakdown by (not disjoint) fields of research is:

• 38 psychologists/related cognitive scientists
• 21 linguists
• 19 computer scientists
• 10 neuroscientists
• 9 people in other fields (marketing, political science, economics, education, evolutionary biology, human-environment geography)

You can see here the sample bias that our own background led to in our initial research!  Especially if your field is underrepresented in the above list, we’d love to hear about what you do.

» Continue reading “what researchers want, part 1″