Data Science for Migration and Mobility (Proceedings of the British Academy: Themed volumes of essays in the humanities and social sciences, 251)

Migration is a complex phenomenon with multi-dimensional factors. With ever-expanding data storage and processing capabilities, new data sources (such as social media, mobile call data records, and satellite imaging) are becoming available to study migration from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Data Science for Migration and Mobility addresses the needs of both migration scholars who stand to benefit from the analysis of these new sources but lack the computational tools, as well as data scientists who have practical and theoretical knowledge in dealing with these data sources but have no familiarity with the relevant questions of migration research. It describes the main conceptual frameworks, explains techniques of data collection and processing, provides case studies, discusses the strengths and limitations of each data source, and critically discusses the ethical, legal, and privacy-related issues specific to each data source.

Albert Ali Salah is Professor of Affective and Social Computing at Utrecht University, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, and Adjunct Professor at Bo?aziçi University, Department of Computer Engineering. He has held research positions at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), University of Amsterdam, and Nagoya University before. His work focuses on computer analysis of human behaviour. He was the scientific coordinator of the Data for Refugees Challenge, and leads a work package in the HumMingBird EU project. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM, and a research affiliate of Datapop Alliance.


Emre Eren Korkmaz is a Departmental Lecturer in Migration and Development at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development, where he teaches on the MSc in Migration Studies. From October 2016 to September 2018, he was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at ODID. He was also a junior research fellow at St Edmund Hall (2017-20) and a Research Associate at the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs of the Department of Politics and International Relations (2018-20). In recent years, he has been driven by a passion for examining the social and political impact of new digital and frontier technologies on migration.


Tuba Bircan is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and the research coordinator of Interface Demography at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She currently the scientific coordinator of the Enhanced Migration Measures from a Multidimensional Perspective (HumMingBird), funded by European Commission Horizon 2020. Her major research interests are migration, gender, equal opportunities, evidence-based policymaking, quantitative and mixed methods, Big Data and AI applications for social research. She has served as an external expert and reviewer for several international funding institutes and as a reviewer for many international journals.