The Virtual Student Lab
PI: Prof. Yoram M. Kalman
The Virtual Student Lab will develop a platform that will examine how students perform big data analyses. Instead of working with many different interfaces, often in English, that requir programming knowledge or computing power that are not available to the average social sciences student, the Lab will standardize some of the interfaces and allow social sciences students to perform analyses that do not necessarily require programming skills. The students will be able to work from a distance, using cloud-based storage and processing resources.
The platform will comprise three categories:
(1) Text mining tools for analyzing large data of texts
(2) Network analysis tools for analyzing networks
(3) Data visualization tools for use with diverse datasets and with data created by the other two tools.
Those tools will be used for applied exercises that accompany theoretical questions, as well as for hands on exercises.
Our mission is that this platform will be used in the future by OUI faculty to simply and easily develop course assignments in various social science courses in communication, management, education, etc. These assignments will focus on developing students’ data analytics skills, while they apply these skills to assignments that develop their theoretical and applied understanding of specific topics in the social sciences.
Team Members
Yoram M. Kalman
Orli Weiser