The Computational Social Science Network (CS2N)

Social Science Research Council, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project creates a research network, resources, and a series of workshops designed to incubate research within the interdisciplinary field of computational social science. Addressing global pandemics, rising inflation, and other pressing challenges demands a deeper understanding of how to analyze the massive amounts of data generated by social media sites, mobile devices, and the large-scale digitization of administrative and historical archives. Computational techniques are vital to derive social science insights from such data, but interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and computer scientists remain in their infancy. These collaborations are vital not only because social scientists must learn how to use new techniques, but also because these techniques have generated pressing new questions about ethics and how technology can exacerbate social conflict or create barriers for economic mobility. By developing capabilities for research in computational social science, this project promises to have far-reaching effects furthering the cutting edge of social science. This project builds on a pilot initiative that has trained more than one thousand junior scholars in sociology, political science, social psychology, economics, psychology, law, and many other fields. It does so through five activities: a) creation of eleven, in-person events designed to seed research across disciplinary lines and expand access to training in computational techniques—particularly to members of groups that are under-represented in the field; b) formation of an online community where scholars can continue such cross-disciplinary research endeavors and share open-source materials for research and teaching; c) hosting an advisory council of leading scholars from a range of social science fields who will guide the evolution of the program over the next three years; d) creation of a sustainable administrative infrastructure to support the continued evolution of this effort; and e) implementation of a rigorous evaluation plan to assess the impact of this effort across multiple NSF social science programs—and particularly those who work or study at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.