Mariken van der Velden
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Fellowship project title: Inclusive Software Documentation
The goals: 1) make an overview of the most used digital tools in the social sciences; 2) conduct focus groups and conjoint experiments to elicit the preferences for inclusive documentation for various groups in academia; 3) provide a template for documentation for tool developers; and 4) make instructional videos for current and new tool developers on how to document the tools in an inclusive manner and organise a webinar to communicate the results of the fellowship.
The why: Over the last decade, the social sciences have turned computational. Yet, there is an uneven uptake of computational methods in the social sciences. Women in the social sciences shy away from using computational text analysis methods because of how tools are documented. Without inclusive documentation, we create a downward spiral that amplifies already existing gender gaps.
