IDSS Distinguished Seminar Series: Computational Social Science: Exciting Progress and Future Challenges

The past 15 years have witnessed a remarkable increase in both the scale and scope of social and behavioral data available to researchers, leading some to herald the emergence of a new field: “computational social science.” In this talk I highlight two areas of research that would not have been possible just a handful of years ago: first, using “big data” to study social contagion on networks; and second, using virtual labs to extend the scale, duration, and complexity of traditional lab experiments. Although these examples were all motivated by substantive problems of longstanding interest to social science, they also illustrate how new classes of data can cast these problems in new light. At the same, they illustrate some important limitations faced by our existing data generating platforms. I then conclude with some thoughts on how CSS might overcome some of these obstacles to progress.