Societies
We’re excited to report growing activity around the LIDA: Societies community over the last twelve months.
Following our initial events last year, the Societies community has continued to develop its vision for stronger collaboration between the social science and data science communities at Leeds. In July, Societies ran its first Showcase event, pulling together researchers from across the university to discuss their research at the intersection of data and social science. The event attracted considerable interest and has informed several events planned for the coming year. In addition, Societies made links to the University's newly founded Social Research Methods Centre (https://socialresearchmethods.leeds.ac.uk/), with several members of the Societies community giving invited talks to members of the new Centre.
Societies continues to have strong links to research, innovation and impact at Leeds with the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre supporting six LIDA DSDP projects over the last year, and the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) supporting a further six. All of these projects exemplify Societies' goal of maximising the benefits of social data science across wider society. These include working with public service providers in Bradford to explore how routinely collected data can be harnessed to improve public health outcomes for all, and working with Leeds City Council to map and better understand new Census data. Projects were supervised by interdisciplinary teams including colleagues from Law, Psychology, Geography and often included active involvement from public service providers across Leeds and Bradford.
Societies was also pleased to support joint initiatives between The Alan Turing Institute and LiDA. This included a workshop on Mobility and Health, focusing on the role of new and large scale data in understanding mobility-health interactions. Colleagues from across campus took part, alongside presenters from several countries internationally.
This term we will begin a series of research events, focusing on different topics that draw together social and data scientists. If you are interested in getting involved in any of these events, or proposing your own, then please get in touch!