SICSS-AMU/Law

June 20 to July 1, 2022 | Adam Mickiewicz University

Pre-arrival

The Summer Institute will bring together people from many fields and backgrounds. In order to use our time together efficiently, there are a number of things that you should do before participating in SICSS-AMU/Law 2022.

  • Complete the pre-institute readings
  • Complete coding bootcamp (if needed)
  • Join in our SICSS-AMU Boot Camp (recommended)
  • Prepare your computing environment

Teaching Assistants will host office hours through Zoom to support you as you work through these pre-arrival materials.

Reading

In order to prepare for SICSS-AMU/Law 2022, you should read Matt Salganik’s book, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (Read online or purchase from IndieBound, Princeton University Press), or Amazon, Barnes & Noble. Parts of this book, which is a broad introduction to computational social science, will be review for most of you, but if we all read this book ahead of time, then we can use our time together for more advanced topics.

SICSS regular Boot Camp

The SICSS Boot Camp is an online training program created by Chris Bail to provide you with beginner level skills in coding so that you can follow the more advanced curriculum we teach at SICSS. The videos and materials are designed for complete beginners and are best viewed as a sequence since each video builds upon content introduced in previous tutorials. If you are already familiar with the topics in these videos, you do not need to complete them.

If you would like more practice after completing the Boot Camp videos, some other materials that we can recommend are:

Please note that the majority of the coding work presented at SICSS-AMU will employ R. You are welcome to employ a language of your choice, such as Python, Julia, or other languages that are commonly used by computational social scientists. However, we cannot support those languages.

SICSS-AMU/Law Boot Camp

All participants of SICSS-AMU/Law will be invited to join in our Live Boot Camp, where our Teaching Assistants will show more advance issues about coding, statistics and mathematics in areas, which will be the subject of our summer school. We believe, this introductory course will help to better understand our scheduled lectures. Live Boot Camp will take place two week before SICSS-AMU/Law in the form of three Zoom meetings, more informations will be publish via SICSS 2022 Slack channel.

Computing environment

R

Some of the activities will require coding, and we will support R. You are welcome to use other languages, but we cannot guarantee that we can support them. Before SICSS you should install a modern, stable-release version of R and RStudio.

Zoom

SICSS-AMU/Law 2022 is a virtual event, and we will use Zoom. You can join Zoom meetings using a phone or computer with a microphone and (ideally) a webcam. This article contains some helpful advice on how to set up your device and space to improve your Zoom experience. (Note: though the article recommends external microphones and webcams, we DO NOT recommend or require that you purchase any equipment to participate in SICSS. In our experience, the microphones and webcams built into most modern laptops and phones are perfectly sufficient).

Slack

Before participating at SICSS-AMU/Law 2022, you should have an account in the SICSS 2022 Slack workspace. If you have not used Slack before, you should review these getting started materials. Slack can be hard to use at first, but we’ve found that it is the best way to enable everyone to collaborate.

GitHub

Many participants at SICSS use GitHub to collaborate. If you do not yet have one, you should create a GitHub account. If you are a student, we recommend that you apply for a GitHub Student Developer Pack.

Office hours

The SICSS-AMU/Law Teaching Assistants will host weekly office hours in the form of Zoom meetings. You can find all necessary information about the office hours in the SICSS 2022 Slack channel #pre-office-hours. If you are not able to attend during the regularly scheduled office hours or have any questions about office hours, please contact our supervisor of Teaching Assistants (Jedrzej Wydra, e-mail: jedrzej.wydra@amu.edu.pl).

Host a Location

You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency.

Learn More