Books

1. Bit by Bit - Salganik
2. Decoding the Social World - González-Bailón (Video)
3. Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication - Foucault Welles and González-Bailón

Articles

General

1. "Computational Social Science" - Lazer, Pentland, Adamic, Aral, Barabasi, Brewer, Christakis, Contractor, Fowler, Gutmann, Jebara, King, Macy, Roy, and Van Alstyne (2009)
2. "The cultural environment: measuring culture with big data" - Bail (2014)
3. "Social science in the era of big data" - González‐Bailón (2013)
4. "Computational Social Science ≠ Computer Science + Social Data" - Wallach (2018)
5. "Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon" - boyd and Crawford (2012)
6. "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior" - Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel (2013)
7. "Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research" - Golder and Macy (2014)
8. "Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities" - Lazer et. al. (2020)
9. "Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication" - Theocharis and Jungherr (2020)
10. "The empiricist’s challenge: Asking meaningful questions in political science in the age of big data" - Jungherr and Theocharis (2017)

Experiments

• Do social rewards lead to an increase in participation on Wikipedia?
  • "Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production" - Restivo and van de Rijt (20120)
• Does exposure to opposing political views increase political polarization?
  • "Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization" - Bail, Argyle, Brown, Bumpus, Chen, Hunzaker, Lee, Mann, Merhout, and Volfovsky (2018)
• Do cues on social media...
  • "A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization" - Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle, and Fowler (2012)
  • "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" - Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014)
• Do early advantages lead to further inequality in the consumption of music?
  • "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" - Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006)

Simulations

• Can mental representation processes explain cultural emergence?
  • "Mechanics and dynamics of social construction: Modeling the emergence of culture from individual mental representation " - Shaw (2015)
• What factors influence police behavior?
  • "How Officers Create Guardianship: An Agent‐based Model of Policing" - Wise and Cheng (2016)

Networks

• How do groups organize on social media?
  • "Hijacking #MYNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics" - Jackson and Foucault Welles (2015)
  • "#Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks" - Jackson and Foucault Welles (2015)
  • "Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter" - Gallagher, Reagan, Danforth, and Dodds (2018)
  • "The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network" - González-Bailón, Borge-Holthoefer, Rivero, and Moreno (2011)
  • "Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion" - González-Bailón, Borge-Holthoefer, and Moreno (2013)
• How do liberal and conservative blogs link to one another?
  • "The political blogosphere and the 2004 US election: divided they blog" - Adamic and Glance (2005)
• Can we identify friendship relations from communication trace data?
  • "Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data" - Eagle, Pentland, and Lazer (2009)
• What can network structure tell us about institutional gender imabalances?
  • "Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia" - Wagner, Graells-Garrido, Garcia and Menczer (2016)
• What can network structure tell us about how we participate in online dating?
  • "Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets" - Bruch and Newman (2018)

Estimating Latent Characteristics

• Do choices of who to follow on Twitter reveal ideological preferences?
  • "Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data" - Barberá (2017)
• Do choices of which pages to like on Facebook reveal ideological preferences?
  • "Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook" - Bond and Messing (2015)
• Does the use of language refelect emotional states?
  • "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents - Dodds and Danforth (2010)
  • "Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures" - Golder and Macy (2011)
  • "Twitter mood predicts the stock market" - Bollen, Mao, and Zeng (2011)
• Are there problems with how we use social-media to infer ideological preferences?
  • "Digital Trace Data in the Study of Public Opinion: An Indicator of Attention Toward Politics Rather Than Political Support" - Jungherr, Schoen, and Posegga (2016)

News Exposure

• Do online behaviors lead to diversity in the news we are exposed to and consume?
  • "Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook" - Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic (2015)

Platform Studies

• Are digital platforms biased?
  • "The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections" - Epstein and Robertson (2015)
  • "Auditing local news presence on Google News" - Fischer, Jaidka, and Lelkes (2020)
  • "Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search" - Robertson et. al. (2018)
  • "Auditing the Personalization and Composition of Politically-Related Search Engine Results Pages" - Robertson, Lazer, and Wilson (2018)
• What are the consequences of algorithmic decision making?
  • "Birds of a Feather Get Recommended Together: Algorithmic Homophily in YouTube’s Channel Recommendations in the United States and Germany" - Kaiser and Rauchfleisch (2020)

Policy Evaluation

• How can we measure economic impacts?
  • "Evaluating the impact of the 2012 Olympic Games policy on the regeneration of East London using spatio-temporal big data" - Zhou, Hristova, Noulas, and Mascolo (2018)
• How do governments censor their citizens?
  • "How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression" - King, Pan, and Roberts (2013)

Language

• Can we use the questions asked of athletes to identify subtle gender biases?
  • "Tie-breaker: Using language models to quantify gender bias in sports journalism" - Fu, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lee
• Can social media posts show that counselling strategies are working following tragedies?
  • "A Social Media Based Examination of the Effects of Counseling Recommendations After Student Deaths on College Campuses" - Saha, Weber, and De Choudhury (2018)
• Can language reveal how boring politicans are?
  • "Same Difference Estimation and Inference for Distinctiveness at Westminster, 1935–2018" - Spirling, Huang, and Perry (2018)
• Does language reflect political partisanship and polarization?
  • "Elusive consensus: Polarization in elite communication on the COVID-19 pandemic" - Green et. al. (2020)

Visual Communication

• How do emotions affect political attitudes?
  • "Facing the Electorate: Computational Approaches to the Study of Nonverbal Communication and Voter Impression Formation" - Boussalis and Coan (2020)

Digital Humanities

• "The Science of Culture? Social Computing, Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics" - Manovich (2016)
• "There Will Be Numbers" - Piper (2016)
• Do literary genres experience cyclical popularity?
  • "The Life Cycles of Genres" - Underwood (2016)
• Can we identify and classify literary genres using computational methods?
  • "Genre, Computation, and the Varieties of Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction" - Wilkens (2016)
• How are some scholars using computational methods to study identity?
  • "The Identity Issue" - Brown and Mandell (2018)

Methods

• What should we do when we have missing data?
  • "Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation" - King, Honaker, Joseph, and Scheve (2001)
• How can we use data science to implement political science methods?
  • "The Data Science of Politics" - Margetts (2017)
• What purpose do models serve?
  • "To Explain or to Predict?" - Shmueli (2010)
• Which text methods are best in which contexts?
  • "Computational Identification of Media Frames: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities" - Nicholls and Culpepper (2020)
• How can we combine data sources?
  • "Integrating Survey Data and Digital Trace Data: Key Issues in Developing an Emerging Field - Stier, Breuer, Siegers, and Thorson (2019)"
  • "Combining Big Data and Survey Techniques to Model Effects of Political Content Flows in Facebook" - Wells and Thorson (2015)

Ethics

• Actually, It’s About Ethics in Computational Social Science: A Multi-party Risk-Benefit Framework for Online Community Research - Keegan and Mattias (2016)

• What are some examples that are ethically dubious or outright bad?

  • "Tracking historical changes in trustworthiness using machine learning analyses of facial cues in paintings" - Safra, Chevallier, Grèzes, and Baumard (2020)

Data

• What is going to happen when we lose access to some data?
  • "Computational research in the post-API age" - Freelon (2018)
• Are big data biased and, if so, how?
  • "Big Data is Too Small: Research Implications of Class Inequality for Online Data Collection" - Schradie (2017)
  • "Potential Biases in Big Data: Omitted Voices on Social Media" - Hargittai (2018)
• Could a popular data source be deeply flawed?
  • "Caveat emptor, computational social science: Large-scale missing data in a widely-published Reddit corpus" - Gaffney and Matias (2018)
  • "Social media for large studies of behavior" - Ruths and Pfeffer (2014)
  • "Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity and Other Methodological Pitfalls" - Tufekci (2014)
  • "Statistical paradises and paradoxes in big data (I): Law of large populations, big data paradox, and the 2016 US presidential election" - Meng (2018)
• How should we collect our data?
  • "Real scientists make their own data" - Sean J. Taylor (2013)
  • "Lessons from Archives: Strategies for Collecting Sociocultural Data in Machine Learning" - Jo and Gebru (2019)
• How should we document our data?
  • "Datasheets for Datasets" - Gebru et. al. (2020)

Theory

• • "Bringing Social Science Back In: The “Big Data” Revolution and Urban Theory" - Sampson and Small (2015)
• • "An Emerging Trend: Is Big Data the End of Theory?" - Macy (2016)

Courses

1. Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science

Slide Decks

• Sarah Shuggars's Dissertation Proposal