A new Summer Institute in Computational Social Science organized by Howard University and Mathematica promises to bring the power of computational social science to the issues of systemic racism and inequality in America. This marks the first time the successful SICSS model is being hosted by a Historically Black College or University.

SAGE Campus are pleased to announce that we are launching two new courses to our suite of online data science courses for social scientists. The new short courses, Research Design in Social Data Science and Collecting Social Media Data, are aimed at those studying, teaching or working in social science disciplines who are looking to take their first steps toward working with big-data driven approaches to social science research.

As the leader of a data science team at the Urban Institute, I get to work on interesting issues that intersect data science and social science every day. By data science, I mean technical tools, architectures, and processes that are borrowed from computer science and are atypical in the social sciences. This is a slightly more limited definition than most would have for the term data science, but because so much of what defines a data scientist at Urban also defines a researcher — cleaning data, analyzing it, visualizing results, etc. — my definition draws a finer line.

Computational Social Science boils down to Social Scientists using data processing and data science computation tools (think R, Python etc) to analyze data about people and relationships.