From Monday, June 14 to Friday, June 25, 2021, Northwestern University will sponsor the 4th Annual Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Chicago, to be held completely virtually. 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 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. A number of these speakers will be unique to the Chicago area and Chicago computational social science community. Topics covered include text as data, website scraping, digital field experiments, machine learning, 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.
We invite applications from graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and untenured faculty within 7 years of their Ph.D. SICSS-Chicago is committed to diversity and inclusion in computational social science, and we welcome applicants from groups currently underrepresented in computational social science. About twenty participants will be invited. Participants will be expected to participate in all two weeks of the institute.
Participants with less experience in 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 or Python 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 March 30th, 2021 at sicss.chicago@gmail.com.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, all events will take place online.