Computational social sciences

Alex Moltzau, in his Medium blog post discussing work in the field of Computational Social Sciences, notes that the field exists because advancements in technology mean that vast amounts of digital information are available for research. The website of Stanford University's research center, IRiSS (Institute for Research in the Social Sciences), elaborates on this topic: Traditional social science topics such as democracy, security, economic growth, and inequality are analyzed in complex ways using methods such as data mining, natural language processing, text analysis, web scraping, data visualization, and machine learning.

This center organizes an annual conference to discuss the application of computational social sciences and holds workshops on programming languages. It organizes summer workshops to train students in Python, R, web scraping, machine learning, and data visualization. Many academics from various fields such as sociology, management, psychology, and linguistics work at the center. 

The increasing prevalence of social media and the fact that people spend more time on these platforms, shifting their socialization activities to this space, have increased access for social scientists (especially communication scholars) to these innovative data sources. The development of powerful computational tools and innovations in quantitative and qualitative research methods have begun to offer new opportunities for social scientists to explore bold, creative research questions. In this evolving era of social science research, centers like IRiSS at Stanford have a crucial mission to facilitate interdisciplinary research, train the next generation of scientists, and support research projects to address critical societal issues. Such research centers ensure the production of world-class, evidence-based research worldwide in response to emerging problems in areas such as governance and democracy, economic inequality, migration policy, climate change, sustainability, and other social issues affecting global communities.

Computational social science research allows us to realize how the social sciences are transforming in the era we live in and how this transformation offers new opportunities for researchers. Through education, research, and project incubation activities, IRiSS and similar institutions increase the capacity of social sciences to contribute to social change and open new horizons for researchers working in this field. This approach shows that social sciences have the potential to offer applicable solutions to real-world problems, beyond being just an academic endeavor.

For communication faculties in our country to focus on computational social science research will both broaden the horizons of researchers and help them offer not only theoretical but also practical solutions to our real problems. The most important advantage for researchers working in the field of communication in this regard is naturally that they work in an interdisciplinary field and that "media" is becoming increasingly digitized.