June 20 to June 30, 2023 | New York University
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-NYU Silver 2023.
Teaching assistants will host office hours through Slack to support you as you work through these pre-arrival materials.
In order to prepare for SICSS-NYU Silver 2023, you should read Matt Salganik’s book, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (Read online or purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, or Princeton University Press). 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.
You can find a list of additional readings to help you with understanding computational social science on this page, Awesome Computational Social Science.
The Coding Tutorial for Python by Mike Dane is an online tutorial created by Mike Dane to provide you with beginner level skills in coding so that you can follow the more advanced curriculum we teach at SICSS. It provides a well-rounded introduction into Python.
If you would like more practice after completing the tutorial, some other materials that we can recommend are:
SICSS-NYU Silver 2023 will be using a flipped classroom model. Therefore, you should watch (some) videos of lectures before our meetings, and then we will use our time together for discussion and group activities. More information will be provided later.
Some of the activities will require coding, and we will support Python. You are welcome to use other languages, but we cannot guarantee that we can support them. We are going to use the online environment tool, Google Colab to code and compile the notebooks. Although we do not require it for the institute, you could install Python, Anaconda distribution and Jupyter Notebook to code on your local computer.
Before participating at SICSS-NYU Silver 2023, you should have an account in the SICSS 2023 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.
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.
The SICSS-NYU Silver 2023 organizers will host office hours in the SICSS 2023 Slack. You can find information about the office hours in the SICSS 2023 Slack channel at #sicss-nyu-silver.
You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency.