May 12 to May 23, 2025 | Pittsburgh, PA
This page is under construction. Check back soon for more up-to-date info!
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-CMU 2025.
TAs will be hosting office hours via Slack to support you as you work through these pre-arrival materials. Please check the pinned post for their office hours.
If you have questions outside of office hours, please feel free to drop them in the channel and we will get back to you.
In order to prepare for SICSS-CMU 2025, we recommend you read Matt Salganik’s book, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (Read online or purchase from 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.
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-CMU 2025 will employ R. You are welcome to employ a language of your choice, such as Python, Julia, or other languages. However, we cannot support each of these 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.
If you have issues installing R and RStudio, please drop by our office hours and we can help get you set up.
Before participating at SICSS-CMU 2025, 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.