Professor Jesse Hoey, along with professor Mei Nagappan and international collaborators, have received a grant for more than $850,000 CAD from the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities (T-AP) for their proposal titled “THEMIS.COG: Theoretical And Empirical Modeling Of Identity And Sentiments In Collaborative Groups.”
The team’s research will explore social and psychological mechanisms of self-organized collaborations, focusing on the open, collaborative software development platform GitHub. The team brings together the expertise of sociologist Kimberly Rogers from Dartmouth College (USA) and cognitive scientist Tobias Schroeder from Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (Germany) with that of Cheriton School of Computer Science’s software engineer Mei Nagappan and computer scientist Jesse Hoey.
With this funding in place, Hoey’s team will provide new data-driven theoretical insights into what motivates self-organized collaborations and determines their success. They will apply a computational model of human interaction that makes predictions about online interactions in a collaborative group. The research will provide empirical validation of sociological theory and formal answers to important social science questions about collaboration as well as generate novel research questions by expanding a theoretical model of small groups to the network level.
The Digging into Data Challenge is sponsored by research-funding organizations from 11 nations, organized under the auspices of T-AP. Support for the Canadian component of Hoey’s award is provided by NSERC and SSHRC. The National Science Foundation (NSF) supports the American component of the research and the German Research Foundation (DFG) supports the German component.
In this round of funding, T-AP, along with 16 international research funders, have jointly awarded $9.2 million USD to 14 international teams to investigate how large-scale computational techniques can be applied to research in the humanities and social sciences.
