With the lockdown and social distancing rules forcing all of us to adjust our calendars, events and even lesson plans and lectures, I was not surprised to hear of speaking opportunities that otherwise may not arise.
A great example is the reprise of a talk I gave about a year ago while visiting Mexico. It was a great opportunity to talk to Social Science students at the Political Science Faculty of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. The subject was open but had to cover the use of technology and I thought that talking about the use of natural language processing in terms of digital humanities would be a winner. And it was…
In March this year I was approached by the Faculty to re-run the talk but this time instead of doing it face to face we would use a teleconference room. Not only was I, the speaker, talking from the comfort of my own living room, but also all the attendees would be at home. Furthermore, some of the students may not have access to the live presentation (lack of broadband, equipment, etc) and recoding the session for later usage was the best option for them.
I didn’t hesitate in saying yes, and I enjoyed the interaction a lot. Today I learnt that the session was the focus of a small note in a local newspaper. The session was run in Spanish and the note in Portal, the local newspaper, is in Spanish too. I really liked that they picked a line I used in the session to convince the students that technology is not just for the natural sciences:
“Hay que hacer ciencias sociales con técnicas del Siglo XIX… El mundo es de los geeks.
“We should study social sciences applying techniques of the 21st Century. The world today belongs to us, the geeks.
The point is that although qualitative and quantitative techniques are widely used in social science, the use of new platforms and even programming languages such as python open up opportunities for social scientists too.
The talk is available in the blog the class uses to share their discussions: The Share Knowledge Network – Follow this link for the talk.
The newspaper article by Ximena Barragán can be found here.