Together with a consortium of partner centres and departments — headed by Jacob Habinek at Linköping University’s Institute for Analytical Sociology — DIGSUM has secured funding for an interdisciplinary graduate school in computational social science. Computational social science is emerging and developing since quite a few years back, but there is still a need to put particular focus on its interdisciplinary aspects.
The combination of vast troves of digital data with new statistical and machine learning techniques opens up entirely new possibilities for answering fundamental questions in the social sciences. The emerging interdisciplinary field of computational social science uses methods such as predictive modeling, text and image analysis, and network analysis to analyze data at an unprecedented scale.
While computational social science has opened up new possibilities for answering fundamental questions in the social sciences, substantial barriers exist to ensuring that the next generation of researchers can take full advantage of these tools and techniques. The Swedish Interdisciplinary School in Computational Social Science (SISCSS) will focus on interdisciplinary training in computational social science at an advanced level.
The doctoral programme will be coordinated by Linköping University in active cooperation with seven other Swedish higher education institutions. SISCSS will offer courses, seminars, networking opportunities, and research symposia that will provide doctoral students with the up-to-date knowledge, skills and networks necessary to make the best use of digital sources of massive data on human behavior. The target group is doctoral students from across the social sciences as well as doctoral students in computer science and statistics with an interest in social data. The programme will run in two-year cycles with students admitted every other year.