SpaceEngine User Survey is up!

Anthro_Danielle · 23 Jan 2018 23:46

Hi everyone! Danielle the resident anthropologist here, I hope you are all well and that the new year is treating you right!

Thanks to the support and feedback of SE mods, we’ve been able to put together a survey designed to explore your engagement with SE and with the space sector.

The survey will be delivered here on the forums, as well as on the subreddit and Discord. The survey data will be anonymised, and will support the SpaceEngine case study I am building as part of my anthropology PhD exploring the use of social and new media in the space sector.
I’m interested in learning more about what you as a userbase/community (and you as an individual) do – your practices, motivations, interests, and experiences with regards to SE as a program and social setting, and with regards to the wider space sector and its content as you access and interact with it online. Any relevant results or insights may also be shared with SE mods or the wider SE community (after they have been anonymised) if it will provide valuable knowledge, improve community support and features, etc.

The survey (Google form) is mostly free-response but not very long – it should take 10-30 minutes to complete, but please take as long or as little as you like to do it. The only restriction is that you must be 18 years old or over to do the survey. Unfortunately this is an ethics clearance issue and not up to me, and I apologise if you aren’t able to take part as a result.

If you are interested in taking part in the survey and helping me learn more about the ways in which people (you and your community) are using new technology to access, learn about, and get involved in space, then please jump in! The survey can be found here:
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEaaVtUBbeqI2Sf8g5-8-5JGBfBH8GFpFWWQ7Xf6Yp36Xsiw/viewform?usp=sf_link>

Thank you so much for your time and generosity in allowing me to learn from and with you! If you have any questions about the survey, or suggestions for what you might like to see done with the results, feel free to reply in this thread, DM me, or email me at[email protected]

Danielle

24 Jan 2018 02:01

I have temporarily made this thread a global announcement in all forum sections. Hopefully this will help you get as many participants as possible.

tornadotodd · 24 Jan 2018 16:08

Sounds like a great idea really. I am checking it out.

Anthro_Danielle · 25 Jan 2018 01:27

tornadotodd wrote:
Source of the post Sounds like a great idea really. I am checking it out.

Thanks so much, tornadotodd! I've been lucky enough to get to work with a range of cool projects and people in the space industry/professional networks over the past year, but I think that SE in particular is such an interesting case in terms of modes of access and learning, and to see people from various backgrounds engage with it in an established social space/community like you have here and on the other platforms is really amazing. Learning more about experiences of space science and other content from the perspective of communities of interest and practice, and not just people who work as professionals in the industry proper (ie., people from the 'general public') is actually really exciting to me, and I think a really important complement to some of the more insider industry work I've done - I have learned so much from the SE community and I feel really grateful for that! I hope that the survey can get a decent number of responses just to see what else we can learn together!

Anthro_Danielle · 25 Jan 2018 01:36

35 responses in the first day - I am amazed and so grateful, thank you so much, everyone! I am so looking forward to diving into all your responses and doing some serious learning and writing!

The survey should run for a couple of months, so I won't have polished/finalised data or writeups to share with you till it closes, but I'll be sure to keep you updated on how it's progressing, and share little interesting or important tidbits as I go in the meantime

tornadotodd · 25 Jan 2018 16:07

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
tornadotodd wrote:
Source of the post Sounds like a great idea really. I am checking it out.

Thanks so much, tornadotodd! I've been lucky enough to get to work with a range of cool projects and people in the space industry/professional networks over the past year, but I think that SE in particular is such an interesting case in terms of modes of access and learning, and to see people from various backgrounds engage with it in an established social space/community like you have here and on the other platforms is really amazing. Learning more about experiences of space science and other content from the perspective of communities of interest and practice, and not just people who work as professionals in the industry proper (ie., people from the 'general public') is actually really exciting to me, and I think a really important complement to some of the more insider industry work I've done - I have learned so much from the SE community and I feel really grateful for that! I hope that the survey can get a decent number of responses just to see what else we can learn together!

Congrad's on the number of responses that you have gotten so far. Best of luck to you..

Quarior · 28 Jan 2018 02:00

Oh is recent. I answer the survey but I have not answers for some questions because I don't know the answers, don't understand or I don't use like space news information because I just visit some links the community posted.
Do you planned to make statistics with this answers ?

Anthro_Danielle · 28 Jan 2018 21:44

Hi Quarior, thanks so much for checking it out, I really appreciate you taking the time to do so

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post Oh is recent. I answer the survey but I have not answers for some questions because I don't know the answers, don't understand or I don't use like space news information because I just visit some links the community posted.
Do you planned to make statistics with this answers ?

It's totally fine if you didn't answer *every* question, or if they didn't all apply to you - actually, if you use SE but don't use/follow other space news sites, that's interesting data for me as well!

Yep, I will analyse the responses to help me understand the community for my research, and I will share any interesting trends, figures, issues, insights that come out of the analysis with the SE community here as well

Quarior · 29 Jan 2018 13:10

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Hi Quarior, thanks so much for checking it out, I really appreciate you taking the time to do so

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post Oh is recent. I answer the survey but I have not answers for some questions because I don't know the answers, don't understand or I don't use like space news information because I just visit some links the community posted.
Do you planned to make statistics with this answers ?

It's totally fine if you didn't answer *every* question, or if they didn't all apply to you - actually, if you use SE but don't use/follow other space news sites, that's interesting data for me as well!

Yep, I will analyse the responses to help me understand the community for my research, and I will share any interesting trends, figures, issues, insights that come out of the analysis with the SE community here as well

Ok, I hope you understand more the community and I said this because for my scolarity, is about statistic but I just in my first year but I have little lesson for crossing variables ( X explicative, Y to explain).
With your statistic survey, I think is more complicated with many variable qualitative with open answers.
Have a nice night/day.

Anthro_Danielle · 19 Feb 2018 23:24

Quarior, Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply! I think I understand your question a bit better now and can (hopefully) see where you're coming from

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post Ok, I hope you understand more the community and I said this because for my scolarity, is about statistic but I just in my first year but I have little lesson for crossing variables ( X explicative, Y to explain).
With your statistic survey, I think is more complicated with many variable qualitative with open answers.
Have a nice night/day.

Certainly, having lots of open free response questions means large amounts of messy data! I will have to spend some time tidying and processing before analysis, but I think it can be a productive process. Like, I enjoy seeing the categories, words, and frames that people use/provide when they have free-choice, because it kind of tells me a bit about the ways they actually think about things, rather than having to fit their frames/thoughts/experiences into narrower categories that I've already come up with? That's what I like about qualitative (and ethnographic) research more generally! Just hearing and learning with many people's stories can be so generative for learning about issues, practices, social groups, meanings, and often as a researcher you get surprised - like new angles or issues you hadn't even thought of before.

But then is anectodal or personal experiential evidence statistically significant or relevant on a larger scale? I mean I think that depends a bit on the research context, but personally think these kinds of methods are great for exploring new areas, and identifying topics/themes/issues/areas that are important, and then you can zoom in and return to them with methods that might be a bit more rigorous.

Standard practice for processing/analysing things like interview transcripts, text responses also involves iteratively developing codes for core themes or concepts, and then tagging the text for them, so you can actually see/say 'Oh well turns out half the respondents thought this one issue was really important and talked about it/framed it using this one concept that came from x place' or whatever, which can help you make claims about the body of data as a whole. Subject to interpreter bias? Sure, that is definitely an issue or argument to make, though there are other tools out there that you can use to help with the identifying of themes and concepts for coding that (I believe) are based on word co-occurrence Bayesian stat models, so help the researcher get around limitations of subjective interpretation... I'm playing with some of them now and they're pretty interesting and fun!

But some minor examples of interesting things that might emerge from bigger open-ended qual stuff like this could be that actually many people reference the same event as shaping or being important for the community, or that users of SE tend to settle into two camps of ways they learn through or how they experience the application, or respondents use particular kinds of language that are different to that used in other similar communities, etc. etc. So far, the responses to the survey are incredible, many people have clearly spent a lot of time forming really rich and thoughtful responses, which are full of all kinds of important and interesting information. Because it is so rich, though, analysis has to be a kind of involved, iterative process involving coming at it from a few angles, and will be a bit exploratory as well, and there does need to be that coding and processing (by the researcher or some other software) before the data is in any form to be getting basic stats from.

Does that... sort of make sense or address part of your question? I mean this isn't primarily a statistics project, as I'm not a sociologist with strong mathematics background! I'm an anthropologist (with additional sociology major) trained primarily in softer qual methods - ie., doing ethnography, running focus groups, conducting interviews, coding/analysing transcripts, doing content/thematic/discourse analysis, as well as using digital media research tools. So *definitely* not an expert in statistics specifically!

I hope you have a lovely day and would be super happy to discuss these issues further, I'm sure I could learn a lot from/with you!

Quarior · 21 Feb 2018 12:50

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Quarior, Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply! I think I understand your question a bit better now and can (hopefully) see where you're coming from

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post Ok, I hope you understand more the community and I said this because for my scolarity, is about statistic but I just in my first year but I have little lesson for crossing variables ( X explicative, Y to explain).
With your statistic survey, I think is more complicated with many variable qualitative with open answers.
Have a nice night/day.

Certainly, having lots of open free response questions means large amounts of messy data! I will have to spend some time tidying and processing before analysis, but I think it can be a productive process. Like, I enjoy seeing the categories, words, and frames that people use/provide when they have free-choice, because it kind of tells me a bit about the ways they actually think about things, rather than having to fit their frames/thoughts/experiences into narrower categories that I've already come up with? That's what I like about qualitative (and ethnographic) research more generally! Just hearing and learning with many people's stories can be so generative for learning about issues, practices, social groups, meanings, and often as a researcher you get surprised - like new angles or issues you hadn't even thought of before.

But then is anectodal or personal experiential evidence statistically significant or relevant on a larger scale? I mean I think that depends a bit on the research context, but personally think these kinds of methods are great for exploring new areas, and identifying topics/themes/issues/areas that are important, and then you can zoom in and return to them with methods that might be a bit more rigorous.

Standard practice for processing/analysing things like interview transcripts, text responses also involves iteratively developing codes for core themes or concepts, and then tagging the text for them, so you can actually see/say 'Oh well turns out half the respondents thought this one issue was really important and talked about it/framed it using this one concept that came from x place' or whatever, which can help you make claims about the body of data as a whole. Subject to interpreter bias? Sure, that is definitely an issue or argument to make, though there are other tools out there that you can use to help with the identifying of themes and concepts for coding that (I believe) are based on word co-occurrence Bayesian stat models, so help the researcher get around limitations of subjective interpretation... I'm playing with some of them now and they're pretty interesting and fun!

But some minor examples of interesting things that might emerge from bigger open-ended qual stuff like this could be that actually many people reference the same event as shaping or being important for the community, or that users of SE tend to settle into two camps of ways they learn through or how they experience the application, or respondents use particular kinds of language that are different to that used in other similar communities, etc. etc. So far, the responses to the survey are incredible, many people have clearly spent a lot of time forming really rich and thoughtful responses, which are full of all kinds of important and interesting information. Because it is so rich, though, analysis has to be a kind of involved, iterative process involving coming at it from a few angles, and will be a bit exploratory as well, and there does need to be that coding and processing (by the researcher or some other software) before the data is in any form to be getting basic stats from.

Does that... sort of make sense or address part of your question? I mean this isn't primarily a statistics project, as I'm not a sociologist with strong mathematics background! I'm an anthropologist (with additional sociology major) trained primarily in softer qual methods - ie., doing ethnography, running focus groups, conducting interviews, coding/analysing transcripts, doing content/thematic/discourse analysis, as well as using digital media research tools. So *definitely* not an expert in statistics specifically!

I hope you have a lovely day and would be super happy to discuss these issues further, I'm sure I could learn a lot from/with you!

So for start, I’m student in the first year scolarity , semester 2 of DUT STID (STastique de l’Information Décisionnelle) in France.
Second, we have a lesson with SAS University Edition put with Informat you can regroup variables qualitative like for example in memory

proc format;
Invalue myInformat;
Yes,yes,y,Y=1
;
run;

.
Third, I think less a statistic can explain large variable (not always) like the temperature of black aster (no greenhouse, tidal force) is explain with the distance between the aster and a source of luminosity like star mainly.
And for final, I was not expecting such a big response. So you are anthropologist, you reporting results I think like a lesson I begin with little php and JavaScript (no script from A to Z but use some library like Google Charts) and analysing transcripts, doing content/thematic/discourse analysis little like we because we made a survey and question 100 high school students for our scolarity and we begin the phase 2 for a statistic analyse from our results with SAS University Edition so there are some ressemblense.
After, you talk about coding, it is with SQL, R, Python, SAS and macro ?
And me too I am not a expert statisticien for this moment

.
And for info, our lessons isn’t 100% statistics, will have mathematics, statistics descriptive, English, communication base, some comotability and economy, data exploitation, statistics programmation and web development.
So your answer is most than I expected.
A little question also, do you have 100 answers for the survey ?
Good luck and continuation for your work.
PS : I put directly the link to SAS University Edition USA so if isn’t your region, check because of course we use the France and a student in your class create a site with langage programmation we currently student if you want to check (is French).

Anthro_Danielle · 04 Apr 2018 02:09

Hi Quarior, thank you so much for your thoughtful and interesting response! I really appreciate you taking the time to explain your thoughts and position in so much detail when I'm sure you must be pretty busy!

I haven't used SAS before but it looks like a really interesting tool which I will try to read and learn more about. My background and project are not in statistics specifically, so anything I do there will be pretty minor/simple. Lately I've been using Tableau a fair bit for simple data vis and some analysis, Gephi for things like network mapping, things like Leximancer/Discursis to play around with content/thematic analysis, and some miscellaneous programs for data cleaning or processing as necessary.

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post After, you talk about coding, it is with SQL, R, Python, SAS and macro ?

So when I said coding there I meant more in the qualitative analysis sense of going through transcripts or texts and building a dictionary of key words, noting their occurrence in the text, building concepts and themes around them that are grounded in the text (this process/method is also called 'coding' which can be a bit confusing!).

But some work requires a little bit of the other kind of coding, for data cleaning, playing with newer scraping or analysis tools and scripts, etc. - I can mostly only use Python a very little bit, but I'm doing my best to keep learning! It's such a challenge to become trained and literate in one field, and then you get there, and realise there are so many other fields that are important and intersecting with your own that you should also understand and be literate in and the work begins all over again XD In that regard, it's wonderful that you have such varied lessons/courses in many different topics - you will probably become much more well-rounded and understand things better for it! What kinds of things were you analysing in your survey? It sounds very interesting and like it must have been a great learning experience.

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post A little question also, do you have 100 answers for the survey ?

So far I've gotten over 150 responses for the survey which I am so excited and happy about! I should close it soon - I will make some posts about that now

I'm so looking forward to diving into all the different answers and stories people shared and sharing that back with the community! Thank you so much for your response, Quarior, I really appreciate the opportunity to chat and learn more from and with you!

Quarior · 08 Apr 2018 07:23

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post I haven't used SAS before but it looks like a really interesting tool which I will try to read and learn more about. My background and project are not in statistics specifically, so anything I do there will be pretty minor/simple. Lately I've been using Tableau a fair bit for simple data vis and some analysis, Gephi for things like network mapping, things like Leximancer/Discursis to play around with content/thematic analysis, and some miscellaneous programs for data cleaning or processing as necessary.

So if you want SAS, you need to sign up and for a non commercial use, is free with the University Edition, else, is not free. And Gephy, I use one times went we add a exercice to make simple link with caracters in a text.

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post So when I said coding there I meant more in the qualitative analysis sense of going through transcripts or texts and building a dictionary of key words, noting their occurrence in the text, building concepts and themes around them that are grounded in the text (this process/method is also called 'coding' which can be a bit confusing!).

So you use database like db, json, xml, or manually or just use directly with Google Forms ?

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post So when I said coding there I meant more in the qualitative analysis sense of going through transcripts or texts and building a dictionary of key words, noting their occurrence in the text, building concepts and themes around them that are grounded in the text (this process/method is also called 'coding' which can be a bit confusing!).

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post It's such a challenge to become trained and literate in one field, and then you get there, and realise there are so many other fields that are important and intersecting with your own that you should also understand and be literate in and the work begins all over again XD In that regard, it's wonderful that you have such varied lessons/courses in many different topics - you will probably become much more well-rounded and understand things better for it!

Yes but I have also the documentation because we can't remember all lines of codes.

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post What kinds of things were you analysing in your survey?

So is just to analysing answers for 2 questions and see if there are a correlation.
Example :
"1) Do you play game ?" "Yes" or "No"
"2) Do you like strategic ?" "Yes" or "No"
So if you see results and you look there are more "Yes" in the question 2 then the first is also "Yes", maybe there are correlation, else not. But of course, we made some calculation (SAS made it for us) like the correlation linear R.

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post So far I've gotten over 150 responses for the survey which I am so excited and happy about! I should close it soon - I will make some posts about that now I'm so looking forward to diving into all the different answers and stories people shared and sharing that back with the community!

Nice, a little echantillon (~1.9 % (I use (150/(404*20))*100)) but is difficult for people want to answers.
Good luck for represent to all members (~8080)

Anthro_Danielle wrote:
Source of the post Thank you so much for your response, Quarior, I really appreciate the opportunity to chat and learn more from and with you!

You're welcome. Have a nice day.

Anthro_Danielle · 20 Apr 2018 00:38

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post So if you want SAS, you need to sign up and for a non commercial use, is free with the Unive

Thank you for the advice regarding SAS! And yes, I probably couldn't access any of the programs I like without university, student, or academic licenses XD

Gephi is such great fun to play with - I think I'm a bit more of a visual thinker so I really value having it to explore data if relevant.

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post So you use database like db, json, xml, or manually or just use directly with Google Forms?

Yep so for qualitative coding of transcripts, textual data, and other things like that, there are lots of options (I'm not an expert in all of them though!). The traditional approach is to do this manually, which anthropologists and other social scientists have done for probably 100 years, but there's lots of software around that can make the process a little easier. Other people in my department use things like NVivo, and I've seen people use MaxQDA program. Leximancer and Discursis will generate concepts and themes for you, based on word occurrence and co-occurrence in the texts, which is pretty cool, and I use them to help me get a first perspective on large piles of textual data, but will then zoom in for close analysis and interpretation, which is more of a traditional humanities kind of method I suppose. Nothing super fancy!

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post
Yes but I have also the documentation because we can't remember all lines of codes

If you can remember any lines of code I'm impressed haha

Quarior wrote:
Source of the post So is just to analysing answers for 2 questions and see if there are a correlation.
Example :
"1) Do you play game ?" "Yes" or "No"
"2) Do you like strategic ?" "Yes" or "No"
So if you see results and you look there are more "Yes" in the question 2 then the first is also "Yes", maybe there are correlation, else not. But of course, we made some calculation (SAS made it for us) like the correlation linear

Thank you for explaining in more detail, that makes sense to me now! Did you get any results that surprised you or were interesting in your study?

I've just closed the survey and have 211 responses, which is really exciting! I suspect there may be some really interesting correlation between different factors included in the survey, but whether I'm able to demonstrate that is uncertain. I definitely have lots of qualitative data to interpret, discuss, and explore discourse, concepts, and themes, and will be able to provide and comment on some simple stats once the results are cleaned up a bit, but I'm not sure about things like correlation, since I didn't build the survey for that. At best maybe I can comment on factors that *seem* to be related but that warrant further exploration and study. Maybe that can be an exciting future project for myself or some other interested person in the community!

Thank you so much for your interesting conversation, have a lovely day!

Madrixe · 22 Apr 2018 23:42

I dont no if im at the right place to say that...but... Space engine is incredible! i am born 1978 and i never imagine one day i can travel in a computer and see the cosmos like that! not just picture, but interactive! Cant wait for .990! If i would be a millionaire i would finance you 100% of this magnificient project! Keep the magnific work! It a dream come true!

Who is online