Reaching out: Django in social sciences

Six month ago, I had the opportunity to be part of the Django Girls projects where I learned the basics of Django. With this new knowledge, I made a web application to manage and map data collected during my PhD's field research. Now, I'm working on extending this application to give researchers and students the missing tool to digitize data from interviews or street surveys.

I intend to show during this talk why is it important to give programming knowledge to people outside STEM and to show learning difficulties encountered by these people. Even if I'll speak of applications I developped, the speak is more a general feedback to help Django community be as welcoming as possible to new comer from all horizons.

Transcript

1. Reaching out: Django in social sciences Lucie Daeye
2. Who am I? Lucie Daeye @patjouk Organiser of Django Girls Paris Founder of PyLadies Paris (work in proress!) PhD student in Geography and Korean Studies Self-taught djangonaut and pythonista
3. Why am I here? Let's talk about Django and social sciences!
4. Naive expectations The software I expected to find: Transform info collected quickly on field into useable and organised data Centralize all kind of data and access it easily Write and cut transcripts. Put labels on some parts What would have been a nice surprise: Automatic import: adresses, gps coordinates, etc. Being able to write analysis or comments on everything Make simple maps
5. How I am supposed to manage data? spreadsheets!
6. Files and folders The old way: all kind of papers in multiple folders The new old way: all kind of data in multiple virtual folders
7. The expensive street survey 800 surveys to digitize 4 000€ of a 30 000€ budget Repetitive task Error-prone method
8. Time for some changes! Do I want to do the same mistakes? No, I want to code an easy solution!
9. First steps : Django admin A virtual directory One entry
10. Growing stronger: KRLocalization Homepage One entry
11. Empowering tool Building a small web app: a one-day workshop, 10h of assembling stuff, and voilà!
12. Why does it matters? We don't want to be left behind!
13. What can you do? Django Girls Initiatives at universities or community centers Teaching material that don't assume you're from STEM
14. Conclusion Programming is a empowering tool. Social sciences need it too.