Academic publisher 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.
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 (a machine learning tool to synthesize qualitative evidence); AUVANA (an automated video analysis tool to help social scientists perform more sophisticated video analyses); Workflow-Integrated Data Documentation (a Workflow-Integrated Data Documentation (WIDD) tool that integrates the data documentation duty into the workflows of computational social scientists); Cognetto Extractor (A semi-automatic extraction tool designed specifically for making systematic reviews/meta-analyses less burdensome for social scientists); Swahili Lexicon for Sentiment Analysis (a project that aims to create a Swahili Lexicon for sentiment analysis).
Click here to read the original press release.
