Today, there is a new window of opportunity to adopt agent computing as a mainstream analytic tool in economics. Here, I discuss four major aspects in which this technology can improve economic policymaking: causality and detail, scalability and response, unobservability and counterfactuals, and separating design from implementation. In addition, I highlight the crucial role that policy agencies and research funders have in this endeavor by supporting a new generation of computationally-enabled social scientists.

Nowhere is the symbiotic relationship of creative and critical thinking more apparent than in the practices inherent to research design, conduct, and dissemination.

Agent computing is a simulation tool that has been successfully adopted in many fields where policy interventions are critical. Economics, however, has failed in doing so. Today, there are new opportunities for bringing agent computing into economic policy. In this post, I discuss why this technology has not been adopted for economic policy and point out new opportunities to do it.

Ahead of this year’s APSA general meeting, we attended the Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) pre-conference, hosted at Northeastern University. The event brought together  political scientists working with large-scale data sets and emerging computational methods.

News media serves as a window into the society its readership represents. A newspaper’s description of a social group both demonstrates and constructs perceptions of that group within its audience. Understanding long-term trends or spatial differences in the representation of minority groups in news media can contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about the role and perception of minority groups in society. 

Teaching and learning resources from the 2018 Summer Institute for Computational Social Science have been made free to access online, allowing more people to explore in depth the field of computational social science.

Fifty years after the "Summer of Love" transformed American youth culture, Andrew Anglin, the proprietor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, announced to his followers that the summer of 2017 would be "The Summer of Hate."

In this follow-on post, we focus on data analysis and discuss co-occurrences of tags in images, and present an example of a co-occurrence network that represents a kind of "mental model" of SAGE journal images derived from the tags.

With so much diverse data to dig into, the future of quantitative social science is exciting, particularly for those studying the granularities of individual-level behavior. In doing so, we must make sure that this research is ethical, robust and ultimately useful

A ground-breaking journey to reveal the new centers of power and control in the twenty-first century.

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The final day of IC2S2 kicked off with SAGE Ocean's Katie Metzler introducing the Ethics in Computational Social Science Panel, featuring Dr. Jake Metcalf, Dr. Laura Noren and Dr. Michelle Meyer.

Saturday started off with a fascinating keynote from Damon Centola on How Behavior Spreads. He talked about how weak and strong ties affect the spread of both simple and complex

The SAGE Ocean team are currently at IC2S2 - the 4th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science, which is taking place at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Here's a round up of the action on Friday.

We are pleased to announce that the 2019 Concept Grants program is now open for applications. Now in its second year—learn more about the inaugural winners here—the Concept Grants program funds innovative software ideas that support social science researchers to work with big data and new technology. We have a small number of grants available, up to a maximum value of $35k (or £25k). Deadline for applications is 15th February 2019.

Apply now