June 17 - June 28, 2024 | Rutgers 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-Rutgers.
Note: even if you have an existing familiarity with R, we recommend at least skimming the R videos because some of the content may exercise different “R muscles” than you are used to using. For those that are brand new or a beginner in R, we do not expect that you will become experts after going through these materials. The materials will provide you with a foundation to help facilitate participation in the institute. During the institute, we will assume all participants are familiar with these pre-arrival materials. Familiarity does not mean mastery, but hopefully it will mean that you feel curious and inspired by the materials to practice the skills and pursue research using the skills.
SICSS-Rutgers will be using a partial flipped classroom model. Therefore, you should watch videos of lectures before our meetings, and then we will use our time together for discussion and group activities.
In order to prepare for SICSS-Rutgers, 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.
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-Rutgers 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.
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.
Before participating at SICSS-Rutgers, you should have an account in the SICSS 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.
You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency.