Grants awarded to empower innovation in the social and behavioral sciences 

Sage is excited to announce the winners of the 2024 Concept Grants, awarding £8,000 each to three groundbreaking projects poised to enhance research, teaching, and learning in the social and behavioral sciences. These grants embody Sage’s mission to build bridges to knowledge and foster innovation in research and education, supporting 28 projects over the past six years that advance impactful methodologies and technologies in the social and behavioral sciences.

The winners of the 2024 Concept Grants are:  

• Giulio Rossetti with Y: The Home of LLMs for Doing Research.

• William Christiansen with educate_R for Learning. 

• Gail De Kosnik, Jaclyn Zhou, and Jingyi Li with The Media Education Research Lab (MERL) for Teaching.  

Y: The Home of LLMs for Doing Research: A Digital Twin for Social Media Analysis 

Y: The Home of LLMs is a social media digital twin powered by Large Language Model (LLM) agents, designed to simulate “what-if” social scenarios in a controlled environment. Unlike traditional models, Y creates realistic synthetic data that mirrors real-world social media dynamics, making it a powerful tool for exploring complex social phenomena like polarization and echo chambers. Dr. Rossetti, leader of the Y team, explains, “Y is not just another simulation tool. It is a versatile platform designed to explore 'what-if' social scenarios in a controlled environment.” With support from the Concept Grant from Sage, Y will develop an easy-to-use web interface that enables researchers, regardless of technical expertise, to design, configure, and run social simulations, democratizing access to advanced social science research tools. 

educate_R for Learning: Making Data Analysis Accessible for Students 

Led by Dr. William Christiansen from Mount St. Mary’s University, educate_R is a suite of applications designed to simplify access to advanced data analysis tools for social science students and researchers. Notable tools include projector, for data visualization, and Data Distillery, for data cleaning and preprocessing. These tools help bridge the gap between complex data science methods and practical applications in social research. Dr. Christiansen highlights, “The importance of making data analysis tools not only accessible but also intuitive, ensuring that users can engage with these resources regardless of their technical expertise.” The grant will be used to refine these applications through user testing, ensuring they are tailored to the needs of a diverse academic audience. 

MERL for Teaching: Promoting Media Literacy in Higher Education 

MERL at UC Berkeley has developed an innovative Diversity Scores method to teach students how to critically assess diversity in media. This method involves tagging texts for bias, analyzing audience reception, and scoring diversity both qualitatively and quantitatively. The MERL team, notes, “Our work in the lab was not only producing data about diversity to analyze for research and share with the public – it was also producing a kind of media literacy curriculum that taught undergraduates to evaluate a media text and express their own evidence-based opinions about how the text handled representation of different minority communities.” The Concept Grant will enable MERL to build a website featuring resources and guides for instructors, as well as publish students’ reviews, to support media literacy education fields like media studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies. 

Katie Metzler, Vice President of Books and Social Science Innovation at Sage, said: “The Concept Grant program is dedicated to advancing innovative solutions that enhance social science education and research. This year’s awardees exemplify the kind of forward-thinking approaches we seek to support – tools that promote media literacy, innovative methods for social simulation, and accessible platforms for statistical analysis. By funding these projects, we aim to foster technological advancements that will enrich the teaching, learning, and research landscape across the social sciences.” 

For more information on each project and their development, we invite you to read their dedicated blogs. 

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About Sage 

Sage is a global academic publisher of books, journals, and library resources with a growing range of technologies to enable discovery, access, and engagement. Believing that research and education are critical in shaping society, 24-year-old Sara Miller McCune founded Sage in 1965. Today, we are controlled by a group of trustees charged with maintaining our independence and mission indefinitely.   

Our guaranteed independence means we’re free to:  

• Do more – supporting an equitable academic future, furthering disciplines that drive social change, and helping social and behavioral science make an impact  

• Work together – building lasting relationships, championing diverse perspectives, and co-creating resources to transform teaching and learning  

• Think long-term – experimenting, taking risks, and investing in new ideas