SICSS-Covenant

June 19 to June 29, 2022 | Covenant University, Ogun State, Nigeria

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-Covenant 2022.

TAs will host office hours through Slack and GoogleMeet to support you as you work through these pre-arrival materials.

Reading

In order to prepare for SICSS-Covenant 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 reviewed 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.

Coding 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 are less familiar with R programming, we also highly recommend that you complete a set of courses on the R programming on DataCamp before the Institute. We have received generous support from DataCamp to access over 360 interactive courses through DataCamp for the Classroom. DataCamp’s learn-by-doing methodology combines short expert videos and hands-on-the-keyboard exercises to help learners retain knowledge. DataCamp offers 350+ courses by expert instructors on topics such as importing data, data visualization, and machine learning. They’re constantly expanding their curriculum to keep up with the latest technology trends and to provide the best learning experience for all skill levels.

Week 1 - Introduction to R programming (April 25 - May 8, 2022)
  • Introduction to R
  • Introduction to Importing Data in R
  • Intermediate Importing Data in R
  • Introduction to Statistics in R

    Relevant reading: R for Stata Users (chapters 1-6, pages 1-116), R for Data Science (chapter 11)

Week 2 - Data management and wrangling in R (May 9 - May 15, 2022)
  • Cleaning Data in R
  • Programming with dplyr
  • Data Manipulation with dplyr
  • Joining Data with dplyr

    Relevant reading: R for Stata Users (chapters 7-12, pages 119-286), R for Data Science (chapter 5)

Week 3 - Data visualisations with R (May 16 - May 22, 2022)
  • Data Visualization in R
  • Introduction to Data Visualization with ggplot2
  • Intermediate Data Visualization with ggplot2
  • Visualization Best Practices in R

    Relevant reading: R for Stata Users (chapters 14-16, pages 311-436), R for Data Science (chapter 3)

Week 4 - Tidy data analysis with tidyverse (May 23 - May 29, 2022)
  • Introduction to the tidyverse
  • Communicating with Data in the tidyverse
  • Working with Data in the tidyverse
  • Categorical Data in the tidyverse

    Relevant reading: R for Data Science (chapter 12)

Other materials that we can recommend are:

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

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.

Slack

Before participating at SICSS-Covenant 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-Covenant TAs will host weekly office hours in the SICSS 2022 Slack and on GoogleMeet. You can find 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 one of the TAs.

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