Dr Sam Martin

Senior Research Fellow · Digital Sociologist · Methodologist

I'm a researcher and methodologist specialising in Big Qualitative Data. I develop methods for making sense of the vast, messy, multilingual qualitative data that floods social media platforms every day.

My work sits at the intersection of digital sociology, computational methods, and public health. I've spent over eight years developing innovative approaches to qualitative research at scale, working with organisations including the Wellcome Trust, UNICEF, and WHO across 16 countries and 12 languages.

I co-created the LISTEN framework for rapid collaborative qualitative analysis of big data, founded Synthetic Discourse Analysis (SDA) for understanding visual AI-generated content in public discourse, and the Visual AI Literacy (VAIL) toolkit for community education.

I believe powerful research methods shouldn't be locked behind expensive software or institutional gatekeeping. The Big Qual Data Lab exists to make these approaches accessible to anyone working with large-scale qualitative data, whether you're an academic researcher, a policy analyst, a journalist, or an NGO practitioner.

LISTEN Framework
Process Mining
Synthetic Discourse Analysis
VAIL Toolkit

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