From Monday, June 14 to Friday, June 25, 2021, Nuffield College (in conjunction with the Department of Sociology and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science) will sponsor the Oxford variant of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science which is to be hosted virtually at the University of Oxford. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together postgraduate research students and early career researchers interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both computationally minded social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists with an interest in the social sciences (broadly conceived). This partner site is being led by Chris Barrie, Charles Rahal, Francesco Rampazzo and Tobias Rüttenauer.
During the first week we will follow a largely instructional program which will involve taught workshops (and group exercises) in the morning, reflections and discussion groups based on the material provided by the other (main and partner) SICCS sites over lunch and in the early afternoon, followed by research talks and introductions to specific areas of computational social science from Oxford and beyond. This will also include speakers from industry, government and those who conduct computational social science research in a variety of settings, not limited to academia.
We will also be hosting a jointly organized seminar series in conjunction with SICSS-London.
The second week will focus solely on group based participant-led research projects, with funding available to build the foundations of teams and ideas which can produce publishable work, with input from the conveners.
Following an introduction to ‘Ethics, Open Science and Reproducible Research Pipelines’, and while the list is subject to change, we intend to hold instructional workshops on topics such as;
- Reproducible research;
- Digital data;
- Non-random probability sampling;
- Text as data;
- Machine learning and computer vision;
- Geospatial analysis and visualisation.
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 postgraduate research, doctoral and early career researchers (within 7 years of PhD completion). We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and fields of study, especially applicants from groups currently under-represented in computational social science. About 25 participants will be invited, and participants are expected to fully attend, participate and engage in the entire program.
Applications are now closed.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, all events will take place online.