A third edition on the Introduction to Programming and Data Analysis with R workshop took place on March 12th and 13th, 2025. Roland Toth with the Methods Lab at the Weizenbaum Institute engaged almost 20 participants with essential methods of data analysis via comprehensive coverage of fundamental R programming concepts and techniques.
Roland asks participants about their former experience with programming
On the first day, Roland guided participants through the basics of R syntax and its integration with Markdown/Quarto in an interactive environment. This included the very basics of programming like functions, objects, and indexing, but also data-related practices like data wrangling, sanity checks, and simple statistical analyses. Among others, participants also gained insight on managing warnings and errors that might stunt the process of coding throughout projects.
On day two, after an introduction to data visualization techniques, participants put their learning into practice: They explored provided survey data and developed a research question, so they could prepare and statistically analyze the data accordingly in R. The result was a reproducible HTML report on the reasoning behind the research question, all data wrangling steps, an exploration of the data set, the analysis, and the results including an interpretation. Attendees also supported each other’s progress whenever possible, while Roland offered personalized guidance.
The workshop alternated between lecture-like and interactive formats
The workshop concluded with a thorough review of useful functions and packages in R. Throughout the event, participants were encouraged to ask questions freely and frequently, and they took the opportunity. The Methods Lab would like to give a great thanks to all guests for their attendance and lively participation!
On November 26 2024, Maximilian Heimstädt, Professor of Digital Governance & Service Design at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, shared his experiences and expertise in applying qualitative methods to studying algorithms in organizations. This workshop was co-organized by the Methods Lab and the Research in Practice – PhD Network for Qualitative Research, coordinated by Katharina Berr and Jana Pannier.
The workshop focused on the complexities of studying algorithms from an interpretivist social science perspective; not only the potentials and risks people ascribe to them, but how they are made sense of, enacted, negotiated and integrated into everyday work settings. Drawing on joint research with Simon Egbert on predictive policing, Max shared how he gained access to public sector organizations, approached team-based multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and learned to understand complex technologies developed and implemented across different empirical sites and over time.
Maximilian Heimstädt presents theoretical approaches to research algorithms in practice
Max introduced three central theoretical approaches from organization studies and critical data studies to research algorithms in practice: technology trajectories, biographies of algorithms, and data journeys that all afford different analytical lenses and offer more nuanced understandings of algorithmic systems. The approach of technology trajectories expands research of the design and use of technologies by integrating broader questions of power, ideology, and institutional change (Bailey & Barley, 2020). Approaching digitalization research from a biographies approach draws attention to the dynamic development of digital technologies, understood as ‘entangled, relational, emergent, and nested assemblages’ across different organizational contexts and time (Glaser, Pollock, & D’Adderio, 2021). Finally, the data journeys approach allows to ‘focus attention on the life of data as they move through space and time, through different sites and cultures of data practice’, and offers a perspective that is attentive to frictions of such data journeys (Bates, Lin, & Goodale, 2016). Based on an introduction of these approaches, the workshop participants explored how their own research has been (both implicitly and explicitly) informed by these approaches, and discussed their practical and epistemic potentials and limits.
The Idea Behind the ‘Research in Practice’ Workshop Series
Qualitative research often feels polished in academic publications, but the reality is that the process can be quite complex at times, and full of twists and turns. We have created this workshop series to center the ‘backstage’ of qualitative research. The goal is to hear directly from scholars about how they conduct their work – the challenges, the unexpected discoveries and unplanned adaptations, the specific methods and digital tools used, and the strategies that help them arrive at interesting and valuable findings. With this workshop format and research network, we aim to create a space for qualitative researchers within and beyond the Weizenbaum Institute to connect, collaborate, and learn from one another.
What to Expect
Each workshop session in the series brings a new perspective on qualitative (digital) research. Invited scholars walk us through their research processes, focusing on how they have handled the challenges of their work. This includes designing studies, building rapport with research participants, analyzing different kinds of qualitative data, theorizing as method, and navigating ethical considerations. The sessions are interactive, offering opportunities to ask questions, share ideas, and discuss in depth. By opening up the processes behind qualitative research, we hope to demystify the work and facilitate conversations that help researchers at all levels.
If you would like to join our network and to be informed about upcoming events, reach out to Katharina Berr and Jana Pannier.
On September 3 2024, Tobias Dienlin from the University of Vienna held the workshop Open Research – Principles, Practices, and Implementation at WI. In this workshop, he gave an overview of Open Research and its motivations, relevance, and formal and technical implementation.
In the first part of the workshop, Tobias argued that certain problems and values in science are the main reasons why researchers should practice Open Research. The problems included the replication crisis (a lack of or low quality of replication studies, especially in the social sciences), questionable research practices (p-hacking, HARKing, errors), and publication bias (journals prefer exciting, expected, and significant results). The values in question included openness as a foundation of science itself and the dedication to scientific advancement instead of emphasizing individuals that achieve it.
Tobias welcomes the participants to the workshop
In the second part, the formal practices of Open Research were discussed. Tobias first clarified the differences between the terms Open Science, Open Research, and Open Scholarship. To achieve a culture of Open Research, he suggested aiming for open access, pre-/post-printing, open reviews, author contribution statements, open teaching, and citizen science. While these practices ususally require additional work, the burden can be lowered by already considering and preparing them in the initial stages of a research project. For instance, by implementing two of the most important Open Research practices: Preregistrations and registered reports.
In a preregistration, any details of a study that are already fixed (e.g., theoretical foundation, research questions, hypotheses, analysis methods, …) are published before conducting the study itself. After conducting the study, the preregistration is referred to in the manuscript, and possible deviations from it are explained. This procedure reduces the possibility and risk of p-hacking and HARKing, and under specific circumstances a preregistration can even take place after the data have already been collected.
A registered report is a more elaborate version of a preregistration. It consists of all parts of a submission that do not involve the analysis and the results. The submission can therefore be reviewed before the data and results even exist. This way, reviewers are not influenced by results and publication bias can be avoided. While a preregistration can be published anywhere, the registered report format needs to be offered by the journal itself.
Participation was enable in-person as well as online
In the last part of the workshop, the focus was on tools and software that help implement Open Research practices. For example, the free-to-use repository OSF can be used for pre-/post-prints, preregistrations, and online supplementary materials such as data, analysis code, or questionnaires. As an exercise, Tobias gave participants the opportunity to implement a basic preregistration or registered report on OSF for a research project they were working on already and try different features, such as linking it to a repository on GitHub. After summarizing the insights of the workshop, Tobias concluded by showing a fitting statement:
Open Science: Just Science Done Right.
During the workshop, participants had plenty of space to ask questions, discuss with everyone or in separate breakout rooms, and interact in various ways. We would like to thank Tobias for this insightful workshop and strongly encourage the implementation of Open Research.
We’re excited to announce our upcoming workshop Open Research – Principles, Practices, and Implementation, which will take place on Tuesday, September 3. This workshop will be conducted both at the Weizenbaum Institute and online, and is open to Weizenbaum Institute members as well as external participants (and the QPD).
Led by Tobias Dienlin, Assistant Professor of Interactive Communication at the University of Vienna, this workshop will equip participants with skills in open research by covering principles of transparency, reproducibility, the replication crisis, and practical sessions on sharing research materials, data, and analyses. It will also include preregistrations, registered reports, preprints, postprints, TOP Guidelines, and initiatives like DORA, CORA, and RESQUE. Participants will engage in drafting preregistration plans and discussing the incentives and challenges of open research, aiming to integrate these practices into their work for a more transparent and robust research community.
For further details, visit our program page. We are looking forward to your participation!
On May 6 2024, Dr. Loris Bennett from FUB-IT at Freie Universität Berlin held the workshop Introduction to High-Performance Computing (HPC) at WI. In this workshop, he gave an overview of the mechanics of HPC and enabled participants to try it out themselves. While the workshop used the HPC cluster provided by FUB-IT as a practical example, most of the contents applied to HPC in general.
Dr. Bennett began with definitions of HPC and core concepts. He described HPC as a cluster of servers providing cores, memory, storage with high-speed interconnections. These resources are shared between users and distributed by the system itself. Users send jobs consisting of one or more tasks to the HPC cluster. Each task will run on a single compute server, also called a node, and can make use of multiple cores up to the maximum available on a node. The number of tasks per node can be set for each job, but defaults to one. Lastly, an HPC cluster may provide different file systems for different purposes. For example, the file system /home is optimized for large numbers of small files used for programs, scripts, and results, while /scratch is optimized for temporary storage of small numbers of large files.
Dr. Bennett explains the difference between different directories
Next, Dr. Bennett proceeded with resource management. When launching a job, many parameters can be set, such as the number of CPU and GPU cores, the amount of memory, and the time used. In order to determine the resources required for jobs, users need to run a few jobs and check what was actually used. This information can then be used to set the requirements for future jobs and thus ensure that the resources are used efficiently. The priority of a job dictates when a job is likely to start and depends mainly on the amount of resources consumed by the user in the last month. A Quality of Service (QoS) can be set per job which will increase the priority of a job, but the jobs within a given QoS will be restricted in the total amount of resources they can use. In addition, it is possible to parallelize tasks by splitting them into subtasks that can be performed simultaneously. Likewise, many similar jobs can be planned efficiently using job arrays.
Finally, participants could log into the FUB-IT HPC cluster themselves either using the command line or graphical interface tools and request first sample jobs. They were shown how to write batch files defining job parameters, use commands to submit, show, or cancel jobs, and check the results and efficiency of a completed job.
The Methods Lab would like to thank Dr. Bennett for his concise but comprehensive introduction to HPC!
We’re excited to announce our upcoming workshop Analyzing Digital Trace Data using Process Mining, scheduled for Tuesday, September 17th at the Weizenbaum Institute. In this QPD Tutorial, led by Jan Mendling (HU), we will discuss the essentials of analyzing digital trace data using process mining.
For further details about the workshop, please visit our program page.
On April 18 2024, the Methods Lab organized the workshop Research Ethics – Principles and Practice in Digitalization Research to meet the increasing relevance and complexity of ethics in digitalization research.
In the first part of the workshop, Christine Normann (WZB) introduced participants to good research practice and research ethics in alignment with the guidelines of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Besides the need to balance the freedom of research and data protection, she informed about important institutions, noted the difficulties of formulating ethics statements for funding applications before study designs are finalized, and provided some practical tips regarding guidance when planning research.
Next, Julian Vuorimäki (WI) guided participants through the handling of research ethics at the Weizenbaum Institute. He focussed on the code of conduct, ombudspersons, guideline for handling research data, and the newly founded review board. The latter is in charge of providing ethics reviews for individual projects and studies, which can be applied for through a questionnaire on the institute website.
Julian Vuorimäki presents the principles of good research practice at WI
In the second part of the workshop, three researchers presented practical ethical implications and learnings from research projects. Methods Lab lead Christian Strippel reported on a study where user comments were annotated to allow for the automatic detection of hate speech. He focused on possible misuse for censorship, the confrontation of coders with questionable content, and the challenges of publishing the results and data regarding copyright and framing. Tianling Yang (WI) presented ethical considerations and challenges in qualitative research. The focus lied on consent acquisition, anonymity and confidentiality, power relations, reciprocity (i.e., incentives and support), and the protection of the researchers themselves due to the physical and emotional impact of qualitative field work. Finally, Maximilian Heimstädt (Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg) talked about ambiguous consent in ethnographic research. He gave insights into a study in cooperation with the state criminal police office to predict crime for regional police agencies. Not all individuals in this research could be informed about the research endeavor, especially when the researchers accompanied the police during their shifts, which raised the question of how to find a balance between overt and covert research.
The Methods Labs thanks all presenters and participants for this insightful workshop!
We’re excited to announce our upcoming workshop Introduction to High-Performance Computing (HPC), scheduled for Monday, May 6th at the Weizenbaum Institute. Led by Loris Bennett (FU) from the HPC service at Freie Universität Berlin, the workshop is open to members of the Weizenbaum Institute with an FU account and access to HPC resources at FU. It aims to provide fundamentals on utilizing HPC resources in general by the example of those offered by FU Berlin.
For further details about the workshop, please visit our program page.
On April 10th and 11th, The Methods Lab organized the second edition of the workshop Introduction to Programming and Data Analysis with R. Led by Roland Toth from the Methods Lab, the workshop was designed to equip participants with fundamental R programming skills essential for data wrangling and analysis.
Roland Toth introduces participants to data wrangling with R
Across two days, attendees engaged in a comprehensive exploration of R fundamentals, covering topics such as RStudio, Markdown, data wrangling, and practical data analysis. Day one focused on laying the groundwork, covering the main concepts in programming including functions, classes, objects, and vectors. Participants were also familiarized with Markdown and Quarto, enabling them to include analysis results while producing text, and the key steps and techniques of data wrangling.
Participants work on their own research questions during the practical exercise
The first half of the second day was dedicated to showcasing and exploring basic data analysis and various visualization methods. Afterwards, participants had the opportunity to put into practice the knowledge they had gained from the previous day by working with a dataset to formulate and address their own research questions. Roland was on hand to offer assistance and guidance to the participants, addressing any challenges or concerns that arose along the journey.
Christian Strippel presents first results
The workshop fostered a collaborative learning environment, with lively discussions and ample questions from all. We thank all participants for their active involvement!
We are excited to announce our next workshop, “Research Ethics – Principles and Practice in Digitalization Research“, which will take place on Thursday, April 18. This workshop will be conducted both at the Weizenbaum Institute and online, and is open to Weizenbaum Institute members as well as external participants (and the QPD). Led by Christine Normann (WZB), Julian Vuorimäki (WI), Maximilian Heimstädt (HSU), and Tiangling Yang (WI), the workshop will focus on principles and best practices of ethics in research. After a general introduction and overview of principles according to the German Research Foundation (DFG), current plans regarding an ethics board at Weizenbaum Institute will be presented and finally, three separate examples for ethical considerations in research practice will be shown.
For detailed information about the workshop, please visit our program page. We are looking forward to your participation!
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