Notes for week 6

There is one reading for this week to introduce you to the notion of computational social science. I have included more supplementary reading for those who want to dig a little more.

Giles, J. (2012). Making the links. Nature, 488(7412), 448-450. Retrieved from http://stat-athens.aueb.gr/~jpan/Giles-2012.pdf

Giles offers a useful and readable overview of the development and current issues in relation to computational social science.

Mann, A. (2016). Core Concepts: Computational social science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(3), 468-470. Available here.

Mann gives a broad overview of the kinds of research that falls under this label. The methods used can often be used to generate maps and diagrams of various kinds, so data visualisation is a key part of working this way.

There are many, many issues associated with this kind of research and Wasim Ahmed maps some of them here.

This work is a kind of third cousin to the machine learning/big data work that is currently flavour of the month/year and whose practicalities are beyond the scope of this course.

Richard Rogers is one of the pioneers of this work in sociology and digital epistemology. His recent book1, Digital Methods, is available for digital loan in the library.

This is a useful summary of some of the approaches.

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