June 16 to June 26, 2025 | London, United Kingdom
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-London 2025.
Organizers will be available via Slack to support you as you work through these pre-arrival materials. Please feel free to reach out to us!
In order to prepare for SICSS-London 2025, we recommend you 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.
The FreeCodeCamp Learn Python - Full Course for Beginners is a free online tutorial that will teach you the basics for programming in python. If you know python basics, but would like to expand on data anlysis, we recomend the Data Analysis with Python course.
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-London 2025 will employ Python, with some excercise being done in R. However, eou are welcome to employ a language of your choice.
Some of the activities will require coding. We recommend learning R and/or Python. Before SICSS you should install a modern, stable-release version of R or Python, for example R, RStudio, or Python - Anaconda.
Before participating at SICSS-London 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.