September 8 to September 19, 2025 | Saarbrücken, Germany
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-Saarbrücken 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-Saarbrücken 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 serve as a 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.
We also recommend the ESRC Social Science Playlist for an introduction to Social Science Research.
Please note that the majority of the coding work presented at SICSS-Saarbrücken 2025 will employ Python. We recommend the participants have working knowledge and experience with python programming. If you would like more practice, some materials we recommend are:
You are welcome to employ a language of your choice, such as R, Julia, or other languages that are commonly used, however, we cannot support all these languages.
Some of the main videos and course materials developed by SICSS Co-Founders Chris Bail and Matt Salganik can be found here.
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. Before SICSS, you should have your preferred Python setup ready. If you need guidance, please refer to the below:
Before participating at SICSS-Saarbrücken 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.