Introduction
The world produced 120 zettabytes of data in 2023. On WhatsApp, around 100 billion messages are sent daily. It would take 100s of millions of years to download all the data available on the internet. This digital revolution provides social scientists and organizations with an enormous opportunity. The availability of large-scale human data, combined with computational advances, such as social networks, large language models, and artificial intelligence can greatly inform our understanding of social behavior and organizational systems.
Welcome to the young field of Computational Social Science (CSS). CSS harnesses large datasets and novel data sources, computational advances, and social scientific theories to reveal novel insights into individual and group behavior. With rapid advancements in data availability and computation, we are no longer beholden to small samples, basic study designs, and simple analyses. New methods and techniques allow us to study and understand topics like organizations, leadership, and psychological phenomena from a brand-new light.
You will learn about the tools researchers and organizations can use to access and collect large-scale data, such as APIs, data scrapping, and human computation, as well as the recent computational methods to understand this data, such as social networks, natural language processing, and machine learning. A series of guided in-class tutorials will also teach you the basics underlying these skills and tools so that you can apply these methods outside of the course. Throughout the course, we will consider the ethical concerns accompanying the digital revolution, as well as appreciate the existing limits of human and machine computation.
Taken together, the course will set you apart from other graduates by placing you at the forefront of the digital revolution, giving you the cutting-edge skills needed to understand human behavior, transform organizations, and solve institutional problems.
The course is open to students at any level—it is not a data science or computer science course.
I look forward to diving into the exciting world of CSS with you!
Prerequisite: None. Coding or data analysis experience is not required. Though you will learn how to use existing tools, the course is not a data science or computer science course.