Questions about statistics have long been a staple at library reference desks. The rise of the Internet and the spread of statistical software packages have blurred the line between statistics ...reference and data reference. This guide is designed to help you answer basic data reference questions without having to refer to a dedicated data services librarian. This concise sourcebook takes the guesswork out of locating the best sources of data, a process more important than ever as the data landscape grows increasingly cluttered. This thoroughly annotated guide cuts through the data jargon to help librarians and researchers find exactly what they're looking for.
Large-scale migration after WWII and the prominence of Jamaican Creole in the media have promoted its use all around the globe. Deterritorialisation has entailed the contact-induced transformation of ...Jamaican Creole in diaspora communities and its adoption by 'crossers'. Taking sociolinguistic globalisation yet a step further, this monograph investigates the use of Jamaican Creole in a web discussion forum by combining quantitative and qualitative methodology in a sociolinguistic 'third wave' approach. In the absence of standardised orthography, one of the central aims of this study is to document the sociolinguistic styling and grassroots (anti-) standardisation of spelling norms for Jamaican Creole in the web forum as a virtual community of practice. An analysis of individual repertoire portraits demonstrates that conventionalised spelling variants co-occur with basilectal Jamaican Creole morphosyntax in 'Cyber-Jamaican' as the digital ethnolinguistic repertoire of the discussion forum. The enregisterment of this ethnolinguistic repertoire is closely tied to staged performance, which establishes the link between 'Cyber-Jamaican' and the negotiation of sociolinguistic identity and authenticity via stance-taking.
We live in a computerized and networked society where many of our actions leave a digital trace and affect other people's actions. This has lead to the emergence of a new data-driven research field: ...mathematical methods of computer science, statistical physics and sociometry provide insights on a wide range of disciplines ranging from social science to human mobility. A recent important discovery is that search engine traffic (i.e., the number of requests submitted by users to search engines on the www) can be used to track and, in some cases, to anticipate the dynamics of social phenomena. Successful examples include unemployment levels, car and home sales, and epidemics spreading. Few recent works applied this approach to stock prices and market sentiment. However, it remains unclear if trends in financial markets can be anticipated by the collective wisdom of on-line users on the web. Here we show that daily trading volumes of stocks traded in NASDAQ-100 are correlated with daily volumes of queries related to the same stocks. In particular, query volumes anticipate in many cases peaks of trading by one day or more. Our analysis is carried out on a unique dataset of queries, submitted to an important web search engine, which enable us to investigate also the user behavior. We show that the query volume dynamics emerges from the collective but seemingly uncoordinated activity of many users. These findings contribute to the debate on the identification of early warnings of financial systemic risk, based on the activity of users of the www.
Machine learning is a means to derive artificial intelligence by discovering patterns in existing data. Here, we show that applying machine learning to ordinary human language results in human-like ...semantic biases. We replicated a spectrum of known biases, as measured by the Implicit Association Test, using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model trained on a standard corpus of text from the World Wide Web. Our results indicate that text corpora contain recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether morally neutral as toward insects or flowers, problematic as toward race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. Our methods hold promise for identifying and addressing sources of bias in culture, including technology.
Insurgency Onlineshows that online activism is a ripe, new territory for non-governmental actors to raise awareness and develop support around the world.
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