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-Beijing 2023.

• Complete the pre-institute readings
• Complete coding bootcamp (if needed)
• Prepare your computing environment

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

Reading

In order to prepare for SICSS-Beijing 2023, we recommend reading 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.

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

• RStudio Primers, which can be supplemented by the open access book R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham
• R for Social Science, Data Carpentry.
• Introduction to R for Social Scientists, Taught by Charles Lanfear at University of Washington. This course includes videos of lectures, slides, and assignments.
• Learn R, Code Academy.

Please note that the majority of the coding work presented at SICSS-Beijing 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.

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.