Dawn Parker received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) via the Digging into Data Challenge (DiD) from 2013-2016. The international DiD program was established to advance the use of computational methods to explore, analyze and visualize the rapidly expanding pool of crowd-sourced and remotely sensed “big data” from real-world systems. Unique among her year’s awards, Parker’s research team developed tools to analyze output from computerized simulation models and compare that output to real-world “big data.”
MIRACLE created a prototype community platform to support complex systems research across research communities, providing creates access to sample output from computational models, as well as the algorithms used for analysis. Building on this project, Parker continues to collaborate with the CoMSES project at Arizona State University, hosting the current CoMSES platform on Compute Canada via a Portals and Platforms award. (This work is also supported by the US NSF BD Spokes: Spoke: West: Accelerating and Catalyzing Reproducibility in Scientific Computation and Data Synthesis (Michael Barton, ASU, PI). Expanding on the scope of MIRACLE and CoMSES, Parker and Piereder have been exploring new bibliometric tools (see Piereder’s GRA Report on page 24) for keyword and scholar community identification, including Gargantext, and open-source tool developed and hosted through the Complex Systems Institute of Paris Ile-de-France (ISC-PIF). They have proposed to implement a Gargantext implementation through CoMSES, which could be available for WICI scholars for specific projects.