8–26 June 2020 | Stellenbosch University | Virtual Event
SICSS-Stellenbosch is held virtually using a combination of asynchronous video lectures, semi-synchronous group exercises and synchronous group feedback sessions. Each day follows roughly the same schedule, as shown in this section.
Morning
Approximately 2h of video lectures to be watched privately to prepare for the afternoon and evening sessions.
Afternoon
Group exercise to be completed in small groups of participants using Slack and Zoom to coordinate and work through the exercise.
Evening (17:30-18:30)
One-hour synchronous session with all participants to review the day’s activities.
About the Exercises
It is important that you work through the chapters completely to understand all of the important concepts (both those covered in the session and the rest covered in the chapter). Afterwards, we have extracted a number of relevant exercises from the chapter to work through. For these exercises you can use the provided notebooks and data here to get started (download the full repo as a zip file). While the solutions for the exercises can be found on the Internet, we encourage you to work through the exercises using the chapter first to get used to solving problems with R.
Accompanying Notebooks and Data: View on GitHub.
09:00-10:00 Welcome and Introduction
Introduction to R and R Studio
Watch the Video on YouTube.
This session is based around chapters 2, 4, 6, and 8 of R 4 Data Science. It is important that you work through the chapters completely to understand the basics of working in R before we move forward with more advanced concepts. First, as shown in the video, download and install R and Rstudio. There are no exercises for this session, your task is to get setup with R and RStudio and work through the relevant chapters before we start working with the tidyverse tomorrow.
Relevant Chapters: Chapter 2, Chapter 4, Chapter 6, Chapter 8.
Data Transformation in R
Watch the Video on YouTube.
Relevant Chapters: Chapter 5.
Exercises available here.
Working with Data in R
Watch the Video on YouTube.
Relevant Chapters: Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13.
Exercises available here.
Data Types in R
Watch the Video on YouTube.
Relevant Chapters: Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 20.
Exercises available here.
Data Visualisation
Watch the Video on YouTube.
Relevant Chapters: Chapter 3, Chapter 28.
Exercises available here.
Introduction to Computational Social Science. Video. Slides.
Ethics. Video Part 1. Slides Part 1. Video Part Two. Slides Part Two. Video Additions and Extensions. Slides Additions and Extensions.
Exercises available here.
Strengths and Weakness of Digital Trace Data. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Application Programming Interfaces. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Screen Scraping. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Building Apps and Bots for Social Science Research. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Exercises available here.
An Introduction to Text Analysis. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Text Analysis Basics. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Dictionary-Based Text Analysis. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Topic Models. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Text Networks. Video. Slides. Annotated Code.
Exercises available here.
Four Strategies for Making Experiments Happen. Video. Slides.
Social Network Analysis. Video. Intoduction to the Exercise. Exercise.
The SICSS Festival 2020 will take place Monday, June 22 - Friday, June 26, 2020. During the festival, alumni from all SICSS locations are hosting events such as tutorials, panel discussions, or debates. Additional guest lectures for SICSS-Stellenbosch participants will also take place during this time. Events that are part of the festival require prior registration. More information is available at the associated link.
Details of Guest Lectures to be posted in due course.
(Festival) Panel discussion on teaching computational social science. Registration.
(Festival) Panel discussion on diversity in computational social science. Registration.
(Festival) Using Empirica for high-throughput virtual lab experiments. Limited participation, see.
(Festival) Creating open source software as part of an academic career. Registration.
(Festival) Opportunities and challenges with industry collaborations. Registration.
You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency.