DSA Webinar: Gaining understanding by structuring inquiry: probing data with one right question after another
Dear colleagues,
You are warmly invited to an online webinar hosted by The Digital Statecraft Academy (DSA), which may be of interest to those working with data and evidence in social policy.
DSA Webinar: Gaining understanding by structuring inquiry:
probing data with one right question after another
Date: Thursday 8 October 2026
Time: 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
Good analysis on clean data can still give a poor answer if the question behind it is wrong. This session looks at how we move from questions to evidence, in two steps.
Dr Stefaan Verhulst (Co-Founder, The GovLab at New York University and The Data Tank; Co-Editor-in-Chief, Data & Policy) will look at where questions come from, which questions get asked, and how governance priorities and political context shape them long before anyone opens a dataset.
Professor David Hand (Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, Imperial College London) will look at the next step: turning a real-world question into a statistical one that data can answer, and how this step can go wrong.
The session will be chaired by Dr Zeynep Engin, Co-Founder and Director of The Digital Statecraft Academy.
The discussion draws on Professor Hand's new book, What is the Question? Deciding What You Really Want to Know (2026)
The webinar is open to all. Register via this form. Please feel free to share this invitation with colleagues who may be interested.
Best wishes,
The Digital Statecraft Academy
My source: JISC SocioTech list - https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=SOCIOTECH
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
