C-LaBL Workshop: Methods for Online Language Research
C-LaBL is proud to host the workshop "Methods for Online Language Research" with Research Associate Professor Joshua Hartshorne from the MGH Institute of Health Professions (USA).
The workshop will take place on September 15-16 2025 at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, and will consist of two parts:
Workshop Part 1: Rethinking your research for the online world
The biggest challenge for most researchers attempting to do their research online is that the standard, tried-and-true experimental paradigms are often ill-suited or outright impractical. On further consideration, this is not surprising: our standard paradigms have been optimized over the last 150 years to the affordances of the in-person university laboratory. The online world has very different affordances, and indeed the most impactful online studies have looked very little like in-lab studies. Thus, this workshop is not about how to run established laboratory paradigms online, but how to use online studies to answer your research questions. The morning session will look at innovative online studies in order to provide inspiration. The afternoon session will be a hands-on "ideathon" in which you workshop research ideas and get feedback.
Both sessions will address both paid participants (e.g., through MTurk or Prolific) and volunteer citizen science methods, as well as the pros and cons of each. We will also consider studies with adults, with children, with clinical populations, with cross-cultural populations, and even some neuroscientific methods (warning: the latter remain mostly aspirational).
Workshop Part 2: Advances in online methods, with jsPsych and Pushkin
Options for stimulus presentation and data-collection online keep getting better. An example is an explosion of recent work using webcams to do sophisticated eye-tracking experiments. The morning session will review recent research on data-quality, including timing of stimulus presentation, collecting reaction times, running eye-tracking experiments, calibrating audio, etc. We will also cover trips and pitfalls that snare the unwary experimenter.
The afternoon session will focus on jsPsych (and its companion project, Pushkin). Why use jsPsych when there are increasingly good drag-and-drop options for running online studies (e.g., Gorilla). The answer is, in a word, flexibility. The most interesting studies (in the opinion of the presenter) cannot be run online using Gorilla or other commercial options. There is a learning curve with jsPsych, though, so we will discuss under what conditions and for what studies it is worth the up-front investment. Depending on time and interest, we may also do some compare-and-contrast with other options, like Empirica or PsychoJS.
For both sessions, we will make things as concrete as possible by discussing actual research proposals and ideas, so audience members are encouraged to come with research ideas to get feedback on feasibility, consider the usefulness of jsPsych, etc.
To participate in the workshop, contact Serge at sergey.minor@uit.no.