Applications are open for the fully funded workshop Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS)  in the United Kingdom. The Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) brings together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and beginning faculty interested in computational social science. SICSS is for both social scientists and data scientists. SICSS started as an initiative at Princeton University in 2017. It will be held from the evening of Sunday, June 16 to the morning of Saturday, June 29, 2019 at Nuffield College. The aim of SICSS-Oxford is to build and expand a network of researchers interested in computational social science, bringing together individuals from across the University of Oxford and from other institutions.

SICSS-Oxford is being organized by former participants of the 2017 and 2018 SICSS workshops and will feature local speakers and live streams from Princeton. In the first week, participants at the Oxford location will also be able to work in teams to learn how to implement the material from the lectures and workshops. Participants will also be expected to present some of their work and research interests early on in the workshop. In the second week, participants will form teams to develop a research project related to computational social science.

The instructional program will involve lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects. There will also be speakers who conduct computational social science research. Topics covered include text as data, website scraping and digital trace data, online experiments, non-probability sampling, machine learning, and ethics. There will be ample opportunities for students to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers. Because we are committed to open and reproducible research, all materials created by faculty and students for the Summer Institute will be released open source.

Cost and Accommodation

The Summer Institute in Computational Social Science is funded in part by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SICSS-Oxford is additionally supported by grants from Nuffield College and the TDEP Awards of the Oxford University Social Sciences Division. There are no registration fees for participating in SICSS-Oxford.

Participants are expected to attend both weeks of the institute. Meals and refreshments will be provided free of cost for all participants at SICSS-Oxford during the event. Accommodation for those participants from outside Oxford will also be covered. Travel costs (up to a set cap) will be reimbursed for those from outside Oxford.

Eligibility

Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty within 7 years of their Ph.D are eligible. The organizers are hoping to have wide participation from researchers across different departments and institutes within the University of Oxford, both from the social sciences and the computational/data sciences. They would also like to welcome a limited number of participants from other institutions both in the UK and abroad. Participants with less experience with social science research will be expected to complete additional readings in advance of the Institute, and participants with less experience coding will be expected to complete a set of online learning modules on the R programming language.