From the evening of Sunday, June 16 to the morning of Saturday, June 29, 2019, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will sponsor the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, to be held at Princeton University. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and beginning faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived). The co-organizers and principal faculty of the Summer Institute are Christopher Bail and Matthew Salganik. In addition to the event at Princeton, there will also be a number of partner locations run by alumni of the 2017 and 2018 Summer Institute, which will be hosted in Bamberg, Germany (University of Bamberg), Boston, MA (MIT), Cape Town, South Africa (University of Cape Town), Chicago, IL (Northwestern University), Istanbul, Turkey (Kadir Has University), Los Angeles, CA (UCLA), Monterrey, Mexico (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León), Oxford, United Kingdom (Oxford University), New York, NY (Hunter College-CUNY), Research Triangle Park, NC (RTI International), and Zürich, Switzerland (ETH Zürich).
The instructional program will involve lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects. There will also be outside speakers who conduct computational social science research in a variety of settings, such as 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. Because 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 Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and untenured faculty within 7 years of their Ph.D. Most participant costs during the workshop, including housing and most meals, will be covered, and most travel expenses will be reimbursed up to a set cap. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and fields of study, especially applicants from groups currently under-represented in computational social science. About thirty participants will be invited, and participants are expected to fully attend and participate in the entire two-week program.
Application materials are due Wednesday, February 20, 2019.