Abstract: TwoRavens is a Web-application for data exploration, analysis, and meta-analysis. Early and foundational components were developed as part of Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data, to explore and analyze data that contain sensitive information. Since then, TwoRavens has been deployed on Dataverse, been funded by DARPA and the NSF, and has seen continued development for privacy applications. The Privacy Tools project fostered interdisciplinary experiences and collaborations with developers, both of which facilitated future development of TwoRavens and made our proposals attractive to potential collaborators and funding agencies. From these experiences I derive a number of lessons for software development on academic research projects.
Bio: Vito D’Orazio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. His teaching and research interests include conflict studies, political violence, military cooperation, and topics related to measurement, data, and machine learning. He is a coauthor of the TwoRavens statistical software for data exploration, analysis, and meta-analysis.