Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
What is the Center for Computational Social Science?
The Center supports research in the overlapping areas of the social sciences and computer science.
The field of computational social science exists because advances in technology mean that there are huge amounts of digital information available that can be used for research. Traditional social science topics like democracy, security, economic growth, and inequality are being analyzed in complex ways using methods like:
- Data mining
- Natural language processing
- Text analysis
- Web scraping
- Data Visualization
- Machine Learning
Center Activities
Conferences
Hosted yearly, our interdisciplinary conferences bring together students, faculty, and members of industry to discuss the applications of computational social science.
Workshops in programming languages
These summer workshops train graduate students in computational techniques to conduct research using massive data sets. Python, R, web scraping, machine learning, and data visualization are generally taught.
Student funding
These $10,000 fellowships allow students to start innovative research projects that go beyond the scope of a single department.
Certificate program
This series of 6 courses trains social science students to use computational techniques in their research.
