Main¶
This is the part of the website where we tell the story of interactions between the five major social science disciplines: Political Science, Economics, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology on Wikipedia! We will focus on some of our main results which will include several interactive plots for you (the reader) to play around with. BUT, we encourage you to pay a visit to our explainer notebook which is where the real magic happens. The explainer notebook is also an opportunity for you to be critical of our approach, sampling strategy, methods and reflections. Anyway, let’s get back on track.
First of all, let us start by sharing a little bit of information about ourselves and why we would ever choose a topic like this. We are three Social Data Science students with a background in Political Science and Anthropology and have spent the past year in the frustrations and wonders that come with working and learning in an interdisciplinary environment. This has led us to become curious about the representation of the different social sciences on Wikipedia. Are they each boxed up in their own discipline or do they overlap and intersect in any ways?
We have therefore formulated the following questions to guide our query:
How and to what are the social science disciplines connected in terms of referencing each other?
Are relationships reciprocal or are some fields more central and influential than others?
How does the language differ between disciplines? Are some more similar than others?
To answer these questions we used Wikipedia pages of theories, researchers and methods corresponding to each of the disciplines. The main part is organized as follows: first we introduce the dataset and very briefly explain how it was collected. Next, we display some of our most interesting findings and results.