SAGE Publishing announces winners of 2022 SAGE Concept Grant
SAGE Publishing has announced the winners of the 2022 SAGE Concept Grant, with £15,000 awarded to Causal Map, a tool that identifies and visualizes causal connections in speech and writing. Five further grants of £2,000 were awarded to early-stage software ideas that support social scientists during the research process.
Questions about causal connections are often a high priority for social science researchers. Causal Map allows users to code, analyze, and visualize fragments of information and make sense of what interviewees say in social science research. Causal Map can be used to visualize stakeholders’ experiences of how a program or intervention is working and create collective empirical “theories of change.”
The funding from SAGE will enable Causal Map to improve the experience for new users, explore ways to gamify users’ exploration of the app, and enable users to view and code PDF files.
"At Causal Map we feel really honored to be given this award,” said Steve Powell, creator of Causal Map, “We want to use it to make the Causal Map app more accessible to universities around the world and look forward to working with students and academics to continue developing this innovative approach to causal qualitative data analysis!”
Five grants of £2,000 were awarded to software tools in the early stages of development, to enable concept testing and software development. The winners are:
Latent Code Identification by Manuel S. Gonzalez Canche. A machine learning tool to synthesize qualitative evidence.
AUVANA by Emad Alghamdi. An automated video analysis tool to help social scientists perform more sophisticated video analyses.
Workflow-Integrated Data Documentation by Leon Fröhling and Arnim Bleier. A Workflow-Integrated Data Documentation (WIDD) tool that integrates the data documentation duty into the workflows of computational social scientists.
Cognetto Extractor by Gratiana Pol. A semi-automatic extraction tool designed specifically for making systematic reviews/meta-analyses less burdensome for social scientists.
Swahili Lexicon for Sentiment Analysis by Aloyce Kaliba. A project that aims to create a Swahili Lexicon for sentiment analysis.
Katie Metzler, Vice President of Books and Social Science Innovation at SAGE Publishing, commented: “I’m delighted to award Causal Map our large grant this year. Causal Map has real potential to support qualitative research in the social sciences as the tool is designed to help you identify and highlight information about what causes what within your text data, then use powerful filtering and queries to help you aggregate, visualize and present how your sources believe that change happens. The five winners of our early-stage grants highlight innovation in research methods from across the world, approaching research challenges from diverse angles. As the world’s leading research methods publisher, we are committed to enabling social scientists to solve problems on a global scale, and we believe the winners of this year’s SAGE Concept Grants will help researchers make an impact across the social sciences.”
You can find out more about Causal Map and how they plan to develop here.
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About SAGE Publishing
SAGE is a global academic publisher of books, journals, and a growing suite of library products and services.
Driven by the belief that social and behavioral science has the power to improve society, we focus on publishing impactful research, enabling robust research methodology, and producing high-quality educational resources that support instructors to prepare the citizens, policymakers, educators, and researchers of the future. We publish more than 1,000 journals and 600 new books globally each year, as well as library resources that include archives, data, case studies, video, and technologies for discovery, access, and engagement. SAGE’s founder, Sara Miller McCune, has transferred control of the company to an independent trust, guaranteeing its independence indefinitely.