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Hackathon Info

Project Sessions

Project sessions are at the heart of our hackathon. These project sessions will emphasize three basic principles:

1. Collaboration

Every project is organized around a particular topic, research problem, or question that fosters collaboration. We strongly believe that greater collaboration and integration of students and scholars across communication’s subfields is the key to a healthy, prospering future for communication science. Thus, we perceive project sessions as a unique opportunity to participate, collaborate, and network with individuals from different communication disciplines to explore shared interests and skill sets.

2. Inclusion

Learning programming and “hacking” skills is often thought to require strong mathematical foundations and long-term experience with computer infrastructures. This does not have to be the case. Everyone – regardless of their academic background or profession – can pick up basic programming skills within the “right” environment. Project sessions at the hackathon are therefore tailored to create an environment in which individuals are encouraged to make mistakes, ask questions, experiment with ideas, and most importantly: feel comfortable and have fun.

3. Learning

While project sessions are a great opportunity to explore, work together, and hack away on exciting research problems, they are also meant to expose people to novel ideas and skills. Although project participation may not grant full mastery of a particular skill, it often offers a crucial jump start for fostering subsequent learning and exploration.

Breakouts: Workshops & Tutorials

Breakouts are organized in the form of workshops and tutorials and will be scheduled concurrently to project sessions. Typically, these breakouts are short (max. 1h) and geared towards particular topics, research problems, hands-on tutorials, or tool demonstrations and applications. Each session can be organized by single or multiple organizers (maybe even you!) and can vary in format from classical “lecture” style to more interactive coding sessions. Ideas for potential breakouts include, but are not limited to:

Example Tutorials

  • Network science for communication scientists
  • Open communication science with Github
  • Literature management with Zotero
  • Lab and project management with Agile and Zenhub
  • Building R/Python packages
  • High performance computing for communication scientists

Interactive Tool Workshops:

  • Designing naturalistic stimuli: An introduction to Asteroid Impact
  • Analyzing the world’s news with iCoRe
  • eMFDscore: Large-scale extraction of moral intuition from text messages
  • Anaconda: Creation, management, and sharing of coding environments

Please note that this is an incomplete list, as (we hope) many of the workshops and tutorials will be proposed by hackathon attendees. If you have registered for the hackathon and would like to offer a suggestion for a workshop or demo, please let us know here.