Bringing together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty for two weeks of intensive study and interdisciplinary research
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SICSS was co-founded in 2017 by Chris Bail and Matt Salganik.
SICSS is a 501c3 non-profit organization. We are funded through grants, corporate sponsorships and personal philanthropic donations. Learn more about our funding process here.
The explosion of data created from social media sites like Facebook and X (formally known as Twitter,) along with the digitization of government administrative records has created unprecedented opportunities for online field experiments, new types of public opinion surveys and mass collaborations that hold enormous potential to help understand and address some of the world’s most pressing problems—from COVID-19 to economic recession and social unrest.
This raises important new questions about privacy and ethics, and reveals that the vast majority of people do not yet have access to training in the methods necessary to collect, analyze, and interpret these data.
The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Sciences (SICSS) were created to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science, and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries.
Our mission has been to train the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science to advance research about human behavior in the digital era.
SICSS aims to provide open, high-quality training to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society.
To accomplish this, each year, we bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty from all around the world for two weeks of intensive study and interdisciplinary research.
SICSS participants hear lectures by leading scholars in the field on a range of subjects from automated text analysis to experiments on social media platforms; participate in group training exercises; and launch interdisciplinary research projects.
Read Post Mortems from our past institutes
As SICSS grows, participants from around the world have begun hosting satellite institutes, ranging from small gatherings, to larger festivals.
SICSS offers organizational support to those participants, further accelerating the growth of the field and ensuring that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society.
Learn more about hosting an SICSS event
Lectures are live-streamed to all SICSS sites from a central location and supported via a vibrant online community that includes open-source education materials that can be used for further self-study or as a model for computational social science courses within other organizations.
Educational content from the festivals, other events and lectures are added to our video library online, where they can be accessed free of charge. This functionally serves as an incredible resource for researchers on a global scale, and creates more equitable access for traditionally underrepresented groups in the field.
Our repository of video content can be found on our Learn Online or YouTube page.
Since 2017, the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science have raised over $1.5 million (USD) to sponsor sites at fifty-three locations around the world, bringing together more than 2,200 participants from 500 universities and 150 academic fields.
SICSS participants have created over 100 projects born out of past SICSS, ranging from papers to software to community building initiatives.
Click here to see a non-comprehensive list of some past projects.
Research incubated at SICSS events has appeared in leading journals and received coverage from major media outlets.
Many of our participants have gone on to do great things, including being published on the front page of the NYT!
As a result of the major media coverage our participant’s research has attracted, SICSS.come has registered more than 150,000 unique visitors from 198 countries in 2019 alone.
We have made considerable progress towards expanding access to training among traditional under-represented groups in the field, including an alumni-led initiative called Varycss.org
In September 2021, with support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the SSRC awarded 25 research grants to teams of participants in SICSS-2021. Projects spanned a wide number of disciplines and geographic focus areas, and comprise a small sample of the growing body of work that has emerged from SICSS.
Click here to view the 2021 SICSS Research Grantees.
If you’d like to participate in one of our institutes, check out the 2023 locations.
If you’d like to see what we’ve learned about the best-practices of running a SICSS site, check out our crowd-sourced post-mortems here.
If you’d like to learn more about hosting your own SICSS location during a future year, please visit this link.
If you’d like to learn more about sponsoring SICSS in any capacity, please check out our sponsor page, and send us an email.