An online conference offers a time to meet and learn from each other.

Continuing our series on the Summer Insitute in Computational Social Science, Joshua Becker traces his SICSS journey.

Before I get into this, you should know I’m a network researcher. So even though this is ostensibly about a summer program, it’s also about networking. I almost didn’t participate in the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, or SICSS as I now know it fondly. At the time, I thought it was just about learning the skills — and I felt I had a solid methods foundation — and mainly just applied because it seemed like the kind of thing I was supposed to do as a grad student. Having never previously seen the gorgeous Princeton campus, I imagined the trip itself as little more than spending two weeks in suburban New Jersey rather than at home with my wife. Luckily, I applied. And luckily, I was accepted. Mileage may vary, but I made out well on the deal.

At the start of 2020 we welcomed Data Justice Lab Co-Founder/Director Lina Dencik to the SAGE Ocean Speaker Series. Dencik is reader at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. The Data Justice Lab ‘carry out research that engages with data analytics from a social justice perspective. This includes research that examines the implications of institutional and organizational uses of data as well as research that provides critical responses to potential data harms and misuses’. Watch the talk below to discover past and ongoing projects from the Data Justice Lab.

And talking about gender equality in social data science means talking about the representation of women in tech and attitudes towards women in tech. It means confronting the stubborn prejudices and perceptions that women can’t code or can’t do stats. It means having a discussion about how as this new community of thought and practice is forming, we have a chance to make it look different than the communities that came before. And in particular, it seems vital to challenge ourselves to do so because of the questions social data scientists are asking and the methods they are using - because of the danger of biased algorithms, of reinforcing inequality through policies based on big but dirty data. 

Watch the panel discussion.

On the 28th of August, we visited sunny Georgetown University to discuss all things politics and Computational Social Science for the second annual PaCSS conference. Here are our highlights.

The baton was passed to the University of Amsterdam for the fifth addition of IC2S2 with the core conference taking place between 18-20 July.

At the end of February we ran a most enthralling event experience. Three panelists, two hosts and about 20 attendees all put their headsets on from their labs, offices and homes to join a virtual classroom decorated with trees, a castle, a slightly scary tiger and a hippo, to talk about the future of VR in social science research.

‘From text to data - new ways of reading’ was a 2-day event organised by the National Library of Sweden, the National Archives and Swe-Clarin. The conference brought together librarians, digital collection curators, and scholars in digital humanities and computational social science to talk about the tools and challenges involved in large scale text collection and analysis.

The second annual Social Science Foo Camp took place at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park at the start of this month, convening an eclectic mix of more than 200 social scientists, technologists, funders, policy makers, businesspeople and writers.

Last week, a mix of PhD students, early career and tenured researchers met in Cologne to discuss their latest projects around bias and discrimination on social media, and the algorithms underpinning many of the most pervasive services we use today.

Watch these short videos as leading academics present at this year’s inaugural Social Science Foo Camp discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by big data and the move to more computational methods.

Explore our round-up of the recent event on collective intelligence hosted by Nesta and SAGE Publishing

Mirsad Hadžikadić, President of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA) kicked off this year’s annual conference in Santa Fe.

In June, I attended the second iteration of the Summer Institute for Computational Social Science (SICSS), an intensive two-week program held at Duke that was intended to bring together researchers from across the social science and data science disciplines to learn and discuss topics in computational social science (CSS). Each day, the organizers Chris Bail and Matt Salganik taught mini-lectures on different CSS topics, we split into groups to work on activities together, and a speaker came in to present their research.

Ahead of this year’s APSA general meeting, we attended the Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) pre-conference, hosted at Northeastern University. The event brought together  political scientists working with large-scale data sets and emerging computational methods.

The final day of IC2S2 kicked off with SAGE Ocean's Katie Metzler introducing the Ethics in Computational Social Science Panel, featuring Dr. Jake Metcalf, Dr. Laura Noren and Dr. Michelle Meyer.

Saturday started off with a fascinating keynote from Damon Centola on How Behavior Spreads. He talked about how weak and strong ties affect the spread of both simple and complex

The SAGE Ocean team are currently at IC2S2 - the 4th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science, which is taking place at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Here's a round up of the action on Friday.

The Economic and Social Research Center hosted the biennial Research Methods Festival at the University of Bath last week.