NDSU is set to host a Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science event June 19-30. NDSU Shuning Lu, assistant professor of communication, will lead the two-week program in collaboration with Zoltan Majdik, associate professor of communication.
NDSU is one of only seven universities in the United States (along with Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, University of Rochester, Georgia State University and Howard University) to hold the summer workshop in 2022.
The institute will cover a variety of topics, including text as data, web-scraping, digital field experiments, machine learning and ethics. The institute aims to train young researchers about how social science and data science intersect by using in-person and self-paced online lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects and featuring speakers who conduct computational social science research in a variety of disciplines.
Lu and Majdik plan to invite approximately 20 participants. Attendees must be graduate students, postdoctoral researchers or early-career faculty from any background or field of study. Industry practitioners who are interested in data science and social science also are welcome to apply.
Lu said, “There will be ample opportunities for participants to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers.”
There are many additional values of the program including long-term benefits to NDSU. “While instructional materials from SICSS workshop will allow faculty across NDSU departments to embed computational social science in our curricula, we also hope it will result in sustained cross-disciplinary collaborations,” Lu said.
Majdik said, “The Fargo-Moorhead area has a growing tech infrastructure – a large Microsoft campus, various tech incubators, and agricultural companies – that are increasingly tech-driven along with a fast-growing biomedical technologies industry.”
He hopes that hosting an SICSS partner site would make the local communities more visible to each other and nurture collaboration while bringing voices from this area into the larger academic community of computational social science researchers.
All materials created by faculty and students during the institute will be released as open source.
The institute is supported in part by a grant from the Social Science Research Council. “The Social Science Research Council has spent nearly a century in the forefront of supporting innovative and impactful work in the social and behavioral sciences,” said Colleen Fitzgerald, NDSU vice president of research and creative activity. “NDSU’s existing strengths in these disciplines means we are well-positioned to leverage the Institute’s training, including in campus convergence initiatives.”
In its fifth year, SICSS provides scholars with the opportunity to develop research collaborations. The organization’s main goals are accelerating growth of the field and ensuring that practices developed are in the long-term interests of science and society.
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