đď¸ Week 01
Introduction to Computational Social Science
04 Oct 2024
Your lecturer
Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science
Deputy Programme Director of BSc SSDS
- PhD in Sociology (University of Essex)
- MA in Longitudinal Social Research (University of Essex)
- BA in Economics (Bilkent University)
Experimental Methods
Social Norms
Trust
Computational Social Science
It is an interdisciplinary field that advances theories of human behavior by applying computational techniques to large datasets from social media sites, the Internet, or other digitised archives such as administrative records.
Our purpose is to map how such computational tools are currently being applied in empirical settings across social sciences.
Collective Action and Opinion Science
van de Rijtâs et al. leverage Change.org, an online petitioning platform, to conduct field experiments in which samples of petitions are assigned different quantities of signatures as treatments. These experiments demonstrate the importance of cumulative advantage effects in collective actions (van de Rijt et al. 2016)
Flores (2017) uses text data from Twitter to show how anti-immigration laws hardened public opinion against immigration in Arizona
Sociology of Knowledge
- Drawing on data from JSTOR (one of the largest digital repositories of academic journals), King et al. (2017) show that men are more likely to cite themselves than women âa tendency that increased over the past two decades
Virtual Reality and Social Psychology
van Loon et al. (2018) paid university students to perform collaborative tasks, but randomised half of them into a treatment condition where they used virtual reality to take the perspective of the other research participants. This intervention increased prosocial behavior
Virtual reality holds great promise for studying how people respond to social settings within tightly controlled experiments
Cultural Sociology
- Salganik et al. (2006) created an online âmusic labâ to study how peer influence shapes musical preferences of new artists. In their experiment, participants rated music from obscure bands. In the control condition, participants received no information about its popularity, whereas those in the treatment condition were shown how many times songs were downloaded. Treated respondents were more likely to listen to songs with high download rates and to rate such songs more positively
Why Git?
Git is a version control system. Its original purpose was to help groups of developers work collaboratively on big software projects. Git manages the evolution of a set of files â called a repository â in a sane, highly structured way
We use it to manage the diverse collection of files that make up typical data analytical projects, which often consist of data, figures, reports, and, yes, source code.
Installation (GUI)
- Install GitHub Desktop from https://desktop.github.com/
Introducing yourself to Git
- In the shell
git config --global user.name "Burak Sonmez"
git config --global user.email "burak@example.com"
git config --global --listsubstituting your name and the email associated with your GitHub account.
The usethis package offers an alternative approach. You can set your Git user name and email from within R:
## install if needed (do this exactly once):
## install.packages("usethis")
library(usethis)
use_git_config(user.name = "Burak Sonmez", user.email = "burak@example.org")
Social Networks