Description:

This new annual computational social science summit is designed to create a broad community of social science researchers - academics, tech industry workers, open data activists, government agency workers, and think tank analysts – dedicated to advancing sociological knowledge through computational methods. Our goal is to foreground social science research and identify areas that can benefit from a deep engagement with computer science and related areas. The Summit will take place over three days, from May 15-17 at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, IL.

Pre-Session:
On Friday, May 15th, we’ll start with training workshops for social science researchers and data analytics enthusiasts who are newcomers to computational methods or who simply want to broaden their computational tool-kits by learning new methods and related software techniques, for example using R to do social network analysis. At the same time, we will host a day-long datathon: an intensive team-based workshop format modeled after hackathons. During the datathon, researchers who already have computational skills will utilize prepared datasets and computational methods to respond to sociological questions developed by our panel of judges. Judges will include one member of the Chicago City Government, a prominent academic and a leader in industrial research.

Workshops: The workshops will include an introduction to core computing skills and an introduction to computational techniques using the computer language R.

Training Workshop 1 - Introduction to Core Computing Skills: the Unix Shell and R
Training Workshop 2 - Social Network Analysis Using R: Network Metrics and Network Graphs
Training Workshop 3 - TBD

General Session:
May 16-17 will feature research presentations, special topic panels, and keynote speakers who represent the cutting edge of computational social science: David Ferrucci of Bridgewater Associates (formerly of IBM Watson), Katy Börner of Indiana University, Sandra González-Bailón of University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Macy of Cornell University. Panels will address issues such as reproducibility across the academic/industry divide, how human subjects review procedures apply to new data collection techniques, alternative metrics for assessing productive collaborations, how to apply computational methods to social science research, and new research in computational social science.