Barcelona Super Computing Centre (BSC) and the Committee on Data (CODATA) of the International Science Council are co-organizing the Computational Social Science Conference: innovative methods, research workflows and data stewardship which will take place in Barcelona on 28-29 October 2024.
Social science is more critical than ever before to address today’s complex local and global problems. With the generation of vast amounts of data and the recent growth of computational methods and computational capacity, social science is undergoing a transformation similar to the one that physics and biology underwent years ago. In the social sciences, however, the inherent complexity of human subjects makes objectivity, repeatability and universality more difficult, compared to many of the natural sciences. Additionally, much data is sensitive, proprietary or insufficiently curated and remains difficult to access and reuse. It has now been about 15 years since the paper on Computational Social Science (Life in the Network: the coming age of computational social science, Lazer et al 2009) was published. How has the field evolved since then? What are the opportunities and challenges? This conference will focus on two important aspects of computational social sciences: (1) new research in the field and (2) enabling data policies and access.
The conference brings together the communities involved: the domain and the data experts. The first day will be dedicated to new methods at the cutting edge of advanced computational social science (CSS). The second day will explore enablers for CSS, focussing on data policies, data access, data stewardship, and the attendant technologies and standards. An important topic throughout the conference will be the issue of transparency and reproducibility and how this can be demonstrated in CSS. Possible outcomes of the conference will be a policy paper and a research paper collection to sustain conversations between researchers in CSS and the technologies that enable this research.
The event is planned as an in-person participation only.
Further details about the event, including an indicative programme and information about the venue can be consulted at CODATA webpage.
Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash
