The National Science Foundation will sponsor the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, to be held at the Regional Institute for Population Studies at the University of Ghana, from August 20 to September 2, 2023. The Summer Institute will bring together postgraduate students, early-career academics and researchers from all backgrounds, fields of study, and countries within Africa. The Summer Institute is for computationally minded social scientists and data scientists (broadly conceived).
This partner site is led by Emmanuel Olamijuwon, Fidelia Dake and Lateef Amusa. SICSS-Accra is unique among partner locations in its focus on sustainable development goals. Throughout the duration of the Institute, we will explore how computational methods applied to digital data or traditional data sources can help us to better measure the progress of African countries towards sustainable development goals.
The instructional program for the Institute will involve lectures, group problem sets, research happy hour 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. Topics covered include text as data, website scraping, digital field experiments, non-probability sampling, mass collaboration, 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.
Registration for the workshop is free. Thanks to our generous sponsor, we will be able to cover accommodation and meals for all accepted participants. We also have limited scholarships to cover round-trip airfare for participants from other African countries. About 20 participants will be invited, and participants are expected to fully attend, participate, and engage in the entire program. Participants with less experience with social science research will be expected to complete additional readings in advance of the Institute. Participants with less coding experience will be supported by teaching assistants to complete a set of courses on the R programming language using this platform before the Institute. We have received generous support from DataCamp to access over 360 interactive courses through DataCamp for the Classroom. Participants with less coding experience will be supported by teaching assistants to complete a set of courses on the R programming language using this platform before the Institute.
Application materials will be accepted from January 27, 2023, until on March 17 March 31, 2023.