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Comment by tchalla | Hacker News Reader

There's another field closely related to Computational Sociology called "Computational Social Science" - an area/community which I was a part of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_social_science

There are many universities like Stanford, Cornell and Columbia which have dedicated working groups for Computational Social Science.

https://iriss.stanford.edu/css

http://as.cornell.edu/block/computational-social-sciences

http://datascience.columbia.edu/computational-social-science

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This is my field, too. I am a Ph.D. candidate in computational social science, working on a computational model of social belief systems.

I'm quite happy to see this on HN. Like many other disciplines, our field is blossoming with the rise of cheap, high performance computing!

If your involved in this field and on HN, please reach out to me at @generativist on twitter. I'm in the process of setting up a community for CSS work, and will be soliciting feedback soon!

>a computational model of social belief systems.

Can you give more details (accessible to programmers rather than social scientists) how that'd work, what do you actually model and aim to find out? Sounds pretty interesting.

I'll be posting some things to HN soon. My writing style is very accessible, to anyone. I always shoot for an "explain it to your grandmother"-level of writing.

Also, my entire dissertation is Python/Cython/Jupyter with a prebuilt docker container, so, it's also low-friction to play with. But, complicated by dissertation rules for sharing pre-publication (i.e. "is this definitely your work, because it's on github and you accepted PRs?").

Can you talk about what software packages, perhaps data structures and algorithms you use? Any shortcomings / low hanging fruit? I see the domain as an invaluable tool for a few applications... any particularly strong ones you can see?

The important thing here is the objective : there are different methods and tools to reach that objective.

Primarily, the objective of Computational Social Science is to understand human behavior but with computational methods. Traditionally, social science was done offline with surveys. But, with the increase in social information on the Internet could we use that data to know more about humans?

How? There are various methods on how one could do so - network theory, statistics, text mining etc. are some tools that are useful to achieve the objective.

Wrt to algorithms / techniques used, you might want to check out this textbook by some of the Cornell folks:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

They also made an EdX course for it:

https://www.edx.org/course/networks-crowds-markets-cornellx-...

Coursera offers about a half dozen courses in subjects seemingly related to CompSoc:

Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis, Stanford

Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes, Princeton

Sampling People, Networks and Records, Michigan

Applied Social Network Analysis in Python, Michigan

Capstone: Analyzing (Social) Network Data, UCSD

Social Computing, UCSD

Measuring Causal Effect in the Social Sciences, U Copenhagen

Smart Cities, EPFL

Organizational Analysis, Stanford

To play with some ideas, nothing is more accessible than NetLogo: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

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