A Summer Institute in Computational Social Science will be held at the University of Cape Town from 18-29 June 2018. The purpose of the Summer Institute in Cape Town is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived).
The organizer and principal faculty of the Summer Institute in Cape Town is Dr Visseho Adjiwanou. It is supported by the University of Cape Town, Russel Sage Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population IUSSP. The support from IUSSP will fund the participation of African scholars outside South Africa. The Cape Town satellite, together with five other satellites in the US and Finland are organized with the support of the Summer Institute organised at Duke https://compsocialscience.github.io/summer-institute/2018/.
The instructional program will involve lectures (mostly livestreamed from Duke University), group problem sets, and participant-led research projects. There will also be outside speakers who conduct computational social science research in academia, industry, and government. Topics covered include text as data, website scraping, digital field experiments, non-probability sampling, mass collaboration, and ethics. There will be ample opportunities for students to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers. Since we are committed to open and reproducible research, all materials created by faculty and students for the Summer Institute will be released open source.
Participation is restricted to Master and Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty from universities in South Africa. Meals and registration fees are covered. Participants from outside South Africa are welcomed only if they are able to cover their own costs (tickets and accommodation). About twenty participants will be invited. Participants with less experience with social science research will be expected to complete additional readings in advance of the Institute, and participants with less experience coding will be expected to complete a set of online learning modules on the R programming language. Students doing this preparatory work will be supported by a teaching assistant who will hold online office hours before the Institute.
Application materials should be received by Monday, May 21, 2018.
