open source social science database
Open source social science is a database of tools for social scientists.
As I grew more exposed to the world of open knowledge and the politics of open access, I wanted to see if I could build bridges between this type of approach and my own background in Anthropology and Sociology.
In disciplinary-specific environments, I often found a massive schism. On one hand, I saw that social scientists tended to think of open source as a computer science debate, not as part of a broader question of knowledge access, or even as a provocation to develop creative ways of distributing knowledge. In my experience, social scientists tended to view technology as somewhat taboo or conversely, as objects of a kind of fetishization. Conversely, when in environments of all hard scientists, I used to find that discusses remained almost apolitical but much more pragmatic, often devoid of the kind of self-reflective navel-gazing I could find infuriating (but also very important) in the social sciences.
While I thrive in this kind of interdisciplinarity, but I thought there might need to be a middle way. I also recognise that what might seem like artificial binaries between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences can only be grounded in my own experience of these disciplines, and isn’t necessariliy a very useful heuristic for others.
In reaction to these tensions, I created “open source social science”, an open source collection of tools that both qualitative and quantitative social scientists can do to make their work more open, accessible, and usable.
The project remains on Github and is free to be contributed to. However, I only actively stewarded the project between 2021 and 2022.