Bart de Bruin

The idea that 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is widely applied within science communication. During my research I came up with an alternative to this statement: 'an interactive app is worth a thousand pictures'.

“An Interactive App is worth a Thousand Pictures”

I, as a computational social scienticts, use computational models as experimental labratories in which I aim to disentangle the complexities within today's society. The goal of my models is not to predict the future, but to expose how the dynamic interplay of social processes on the microlevel might be an explanation of the observed macro-level phenomena like for example political polarization and the accelaration of sustainable behavior adoption. To make our research findings accessible to a broader audience, I believe that we, as modelling community, need to open up our black box models.

Beyond publishing the code of the computer model and explaining the model design principles, I advocate for making the modelling results open access. Active interaction with the modelling output, bridges the gap between the model and you, the target audience. If you can test yourself what happends to the model dynamics if parameter settings are interest, developing a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics between model components, input data and modelling outputs will be much easier and intuitive.

With this idea in mind, I have developed multiple Open Access Interactive Applications for several of my research outputs in which you, as a person of interest, can generate your own graphics based on the data of the conducted empirical research or simulation models.