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-CMU 2025.

• Browse through the pre-institute readings
• Complete coding boot camp
  • Complete by April 25th for participants with conditional acceptance, optional for others
• Prepare your computing environment

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Office Hours

Our TAs, Elizabeth Cucuzzella and Vu Hoang, will be hosting office hours via Discord (invitation via email) to support you as you work through installations and the coding bootcamp. Office hours begin on March 27th (Thursday) and scheduled in Eastern Time (ET) every:

• 5 - 6pm on Tuesday
• 9 - 10am on Thursday
• 5 - 6pm on Thursday
• 9 - 10am on Friday

Please check the Discord channel for any changes in 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.

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Recommended Readings

What is computational social science (CSS)?

If computational social science is new to you, we recommend browsing Matt Salganik’s Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age. and Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism. These books are readily availble online through open access/open review copies or you can purchase them from your favorite bookseller.

You can also find a physical copy of Bit by Bit or the publication copy of Data Feminism in our library.

Also check out:

• Hanna Wallach’s opinon piece Computational Social Science ≠ Computer Science + Social Data,
• Rosaria Conte and colleagues’ Manifesto of computational social science
• danah boyd & Kate Crawford’s Critical Questions for Big Data (or author’s manuscript)
• Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., Rode, J., Hoffmann, A.L., Salehi, N., Nakamura, L.’s Femninist Data Manifest-No
• Nikolitsa Grigoropoulou & Mario L. Small’s comment The data revolution in social science needs qualitative research (or author’s copy)
• Alberto Cairo’s How charts lie : getting smarter about visual information (available as a physical copy in our library)

Examples of CSS and data science projects

• CMU’s Center for Shared Prosperity’s Projects
• Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center’s Projects
• Civic Switchboard
• Transdisciplinary research lab at Penn: SAFELab
• Penn Media Accountability Project (PennMAP): Media Bias Detector
• NYU Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP): Data Collections and Tools
• The Awesome Computational Social Science list

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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.

Please headover to the boot camp page to access the materials. It should take approximately 7 hours to go through the tutorials and exercises. We recommend pacing them out across the month. Our TAs are available to help you as you complete the materials.

Additional Resources

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

• Learn R with the swirl package
• Posit Recipes (previously RStudio Primers), which can be supplemented with R for Data Science (2e) by Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund
• 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

Please note that the majority of the coding work presented at SICSS-CMU 2025 will be done in R. You are welcome to program in a language of your choice, such as Python and Julia, but we cannot guarantee that we can support them.

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Setting up your Computing Environment

R and RStudio

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.

Discord Server

Before participating in our in-person institute, you should have an account on the SICSS @ CMU Discord server. The invitation to join the server was sent to the email address you shared when confirming your participation. If you have not used Discord before, you should review the Beginner’s Guide to Discord. Please reach out if you need help getting Discord set up.

GitHub

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.