The DARC Arts: Computer Group’s Wizardry Helps Enable Research
DARC’s Mason Jiang, left, and Alex Storer deal with enormous, complex datasets. | Photo by Elena Zhukova
When faculty need a hand unlocking data, this is who they call.
Mason Jiang knew what he was being asked to do was daunting, maybe impossible. Greg Martin, associate professor of political economy, wanted to harvest all the political ads published on Facebook during the 2018 election season for a study comparing online and offline advertising.
Jiang, a research analytics scientist in the Data, Analytics, and Research Computing (DARC) group, had never encountered a dataset like this before. Although Facebook had given Martin permission to download more than 600,000 ads, it would take weeks of work to make the data accessible. Jiang needed to separate each ad as well as the text, images, audio, and video – an ocean of data so enormous it took DARC’s computers six weeks running 24/7 to process it all.
Five months later, Jiang presented Martin with the Facebook data, ready to use. In February 2021, Martin and four co-authors published “Political Advertising Online and Offline” in American Political Science Review. “Mason’s assistance was a huge productivity enhancement,” Martin says. “It would have taken us much longer to complete the project on our own.”
The DARC team supports faculty in their research, tackling complex challenges that require special expertise. They prepare large-scale datasets, assist with data analysis, and consult on research design. DARC specialists also manage on-premise Stanford GSB research servers, providing the storage, memory, and processing necessary for computationally intensive research.
Data could be just about anything, says DARC Director Alex Storer. “A book is data. It could be recordings of conversations. It could be scanned PDFs from the archives of 17th-century France.”
DARC is part of an evolving research support structure that also includes the business library under the umbrella of the Research Hub, whose technical experts and data specialists form a cross-functional unit to assist faculty. “The existence of the DARC team means the faculty don’t have to rely on raw documents for quantitative data or to be experts in data analysis,” says Storer. “It opens up new directions for the research that wouldn’t have been possible.
Read the full, original story to learn more about how DARC supports Stanford GSB faculty research initiatives.
