Duke University

June 17, 2018 - June 30, 2018 | Duke University

Schedule & Materials

Sunday June 17, 2018
  • Opening Dinner (Not open to public/No livestream)

Monday June 18, 2018 - Introduction and Ethics
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:15 - 9:30 Introductions (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:30 - 10:00 Introduction to computational social science * Video, slides

  • 10:00 - 10:30 Why SICSS? * Video, slides

  • 10:30 - 10:45 Coffee Break

  • 10:45 - 11:30 Ethics: Principles-based approach * Video, slides

  • 11:30 - 12:15 Four areas of difficulty: informed consent, informational risk, privacy, and making decisions in the face of uncertainty * Video, slides

  • 12:15 - 12:30 Introduction to the group exercise * Slides

  • 12:30 - 1:30 Lunch (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 1:30 - 3:45 Group exercise (Not open to public/No livestream) * Case study 1, Case study 2

  • 3:45 - 4:00 Break

  • 4:00 - 5:30 Guest speaker: Duncan Watts * Video

  • 6:00 - 7:30 Dinner & discussion (Not open to public/No livestream)

Tuesday June 19, 2018 - Collecting Digital Trace Data
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:15 - 9:30 What is digital trace data? * Video, slides

  • 9:30 - 9:45 Strengths and weakness of digital trace data * Video, slides

  • 9:45 - 10:15 Screen-Scraping * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 10:15 - 10:30 Coffee Break

  • 10:30 - 11:00 Application Programming Interfaces * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 11:00 - 12:30 Building Apps and Bots for Social Science Research * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 12:30 - 1:30 Lunch (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 1:30 - 3:45 Group Exercise (Not open to public/No livestream) * Description of exercise

  • 3:45 - 4:00 Break

  • 4:00 - 5:30 Guest speaker: Jim Wilson (Russell Sage Foundation) * Video

  • 6:00 - 7:30 Dinner & Discussion (Not open to public/No livestream)

Wednesday June 20, 2018 - Automated Text Analysis
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:15 - 9:30 History of quantitative text analysis * Video, slides

  • 9:30 - 9:45 Basic Text Analysis/GREP * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 9:45 - 10:00 Dictionary-Based Text Analysis * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 10:00 - 10:15 Coffee Break

  • 10:15 - 11:15 Topic models/Structural Topic Models * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 11:15 - 11:20 Break

  • 11:20 - 12:30 Text Networks * Video, slides, annotated code

  • 12:30 - 1:30 Lunch (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 1:30 - 4:00 Group Exercise (Not open to public/No livestream) * Description of exercise

  • No Guest Speaker Tonight

  • 6:00 - 7:30 Dinner & Discussion (Not open to public/No livestream)

Thursday June 21, 2018 - Surveys in the Digital Age
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:15 - 9:45 Survey research in the digital age * Video, slides

  • 9:45 - 10:15 Probability and non-probability sampling * Video, slides

  • 10:15 - 10:30 Coffee break

  • 10:30 - 11:00 Computer-administered interviews and wiki surveys * Video, slides

  • 11:00 - 11:30 Combining surveys and big data * Video, slides

  • 11:30 - 12:00 Group exercise introduction * Slides

  • 12:00 - 12:30 Begin group exercise * Desciption of exercise (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 12:30 - 1:30 Lunch

  • 1:30 - 3:15 Continue group exercise (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 3:15 - 3:45 Discuss activity and open-source data * Slides (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 3:45 - 4:00 Break

  • 4:00 - 5:30 Guest speaker: David Lazer

  • 6:00 - 7:30 Dinner & Discussion (Not open to public/No livestream)

Friday June 22, 2018 - Mass Collaboration
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:15 - 9:30 Mass collaboration * Video, slides

  • 9:30 - 9:45 Human computation * Video, slides

  • 9:45 - 10:00 Open call * Video, slides

  • 10:00 - 10:15 Distributed data collection * Video, slides

  • 10:15 - 10:30 Coffee break

  • 10:30 - 11:30 Introduction to the Fragile Families Challenge * Slides

  • 11:30 - 12:30 Working on the Fragile Families Challenge (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 12:30 - 1:30 Lunch

  • 1:30 - 3:30 Fragile Families Challenge * Leaderboard (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 3:30 - 3:45 Discussion of the Fragile Families Challenge (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 3:45 - 4:00 Break

  • 4:00 - 5:30 Guest speaker: Sendhil Mullainathan * Video

  • 6:00 - 7:30 Dinner & Discussion (Not open to public/No livestream)

Saturday June 23, 2018 - Experiments
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 9:15 - 9:45 What, why, and which experiments? * Video, slides

  • 9:45 - 10:15 Moving beyond simple experiments * Video, slides

  • 10:15 - 10:30 Coffee break

  • 10:30 - 11:15 Four strategies for experiments * Video, slides

  • 11:15 - 11:45 Zero variable cost data and musiclab * Video, slides

  • 11:45 - 12:15 3 Rs * Video, Slides

  • 12:15 - 12:30 Logistics (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • 12:30 - 1:30 Lunch (Not open to public/No livestream)

  • Afternoon off

Sunday June 24, 2018 - Day off
Monday June 25, 2018 - Work on projects (Not open to public/No livestream)
  • 11:00 - 12:00 Gary King (not in person)

  • 12:30 - 12:45 Flash Talk: Cleaning up the data cleaning process: Reproducible data cleaning in R (Anne Helby Petersen) * Slides

  • 12:45 - 1:00 Flash Talk: Entropy and information-theoretic methods for text analysis (Ryan J. Gallagher) * Slides

  • 4:00 - 5:30 Guest speaker: Deen Freelon * Video

Tuesday June 26, 2018 - Work on projects (Not open to public/No livestream)
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Flash Talk: Running R Studio in your web browser/in the cloud with AWS (Chris Bail)

  • 9:15 - 9:30 Flash Talk: Making .Rpres and .rmarkdown files (Chris Bail)

  • 12:30 - 12:45 Flash Talk: Text interpretation & the Constitution (Trang (Mae) Nguyen)

  • 12:45 - 1:00 Flash Talk: Open Review Toolkit (Matthew Salganik)

  • 1:00 - 1:15 Flash Talk: Utility from beliefs and information - and an experiment on persuasion (David Hagmann)

  • 1:15 - 1:30 Flash Talk: Parallelism Basics for Data Analysis (plus: How to Get 5,000x Speedup without Really Trying) (Jeff Lockhart)

  • 4:00 - 5:30 Guest speaker: Kristian Lum (not in person)

Wednesday June 27, 2018 - Work on projects (Not open to public/No livestream)
  • 9:00 - 9:15 Flash Talk: Facebook’s Advertising Platform data for Demographic Research (Francesco Rampazzo)

  • 9:15 - 9:30 Flash Talk: Machine translation and bag of words models (Martijn Schoonvelde)

  • 12:30 - 2:00 Guest speaker: Monica Lee * Video

Thursday June 28, 2018 - Work on projects (Not open to public/No livestream)
  • 12:30 - 12:45 A new dataset on nonprofits from the IRS (Stan Oklobdzija)

  • 12:45 - 1:00 Flash Talk: Deep Learning: Primer and (Cool) Applications (Hussein Mohsen)

  • 1:00 - 1:15 Flash Talk: Urban big data: opportunities and challenges (Tina Law)

  • 1:15 - 1:30 Flash Talk: Using Github/Git to manage code and collaborate with others (David Holtz)

  • 1:30 - 1:45 Flash Talk: Network effects on Inequality (Eaman Jahani)

  • 1:45 - 2:00 Guidelines for group project prensentations * Slides

  • 5:00 - 6:00 Guest speaker: Kieran Healy

Friday June 29, 2018 - Present final projects
  • 2:30 - 2:50 Fun Clustering of SICSS participants (Tina Law, Jeff Lockhart)

  • 2:50 - 3:20 Facebook for demographics and surveys in developing countries (Anne Helby Petersen, Francesco Rampazzo, Leah Rosenzweig, Katherine Hoffmann Pham, Tina Law, Julien Migozzi)

  • 3:20 - 3:50 Cracking the Coding Interview (Dave Holtz, Janet Xu, Sanaz Mobasseri, Zanele Munyikwa, and Lily Fesler)

  • 3:50 - 4:00 Coffee Break

  • 4:00 - 4:20 Polarization and Exposure to Outgroup (Douglas Guilbeault, Yan Leng, David Hagmann, Ryan Gallagher, Nicolò Cavalli, Natalie Gallagher, Elena Labzina, Eaman Jahani)

  • 4:20 - 4:40 SketchNets. Combining Text, Network, and Spatial Analysis to evaluate perceptions of neighborhoods (Hussein Mohsen, Ieke de Vries, Julien Migozzi, Tina Law, Mae Trang, Marcus Mann, Friedolin Merhout)

  • 4:40 - 5:10 Political Twitter Images (Jeff Lockhart, Stan Oklobdzija, Martijn Schoonvelde, Carly Knight, Carsten Schwemmer, Emily Bello-Pardo, Iacopo Pozzana)

  • 5:30 Closing dinner (Not open to public/No livestream)

Saturday June 30, 2018
  • Participants depart

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