Important dates
- Tutorial proposal submission deadline: February 2, 2024
- Notification of tutorial acceptance: February 16, 2024
- Early-bird registration deadline: May 8, 2024
- Tutorial day: July 17, 2024
- Conference days: July 18-20, 2024
Submission Instructions
Submissions for Tutorial proposals should be formatted according to the official LATEX template or MS WORD template and should be no more than three pages in length. The submission file must be submitted in PDF format and should be no larger than 20MB. Proposals should contain the following:
- Title
- Presenters / organizers: Please provide names, affiliations, email addresses, and short bios (up to 200 words) for each presenter. Bios should cover the presenters' expertise related to the topic of the tutorial. If there are multiple presenters, please describe how the time will be divided between them.
- Topic: An abstract describing the topic (approximately 250 words)
- Rationale: What is the objective / learning outcome of the tutorial? What is the benefit for the attendees? Why is this tutorial important to the IC2S2 community?
- Format: A description of the proposed event format and a list of proposed activities, with a description of the hands-on component (tools, packages, methods etc). We encourage organizers to specify any technique that they can offer to broaden the accessibility of the content (e.g., closed captioning of slides).
- Equipment: A short note on equipment or features required for the tutorial.
- Audience: A short statement about the expected target audience. What prior knowledge, if any, do you expect from the audience?
- Proposed length: please choose from 3 hours (full session) or 6 hours (full day). If you are flexible, please indicate in the outline which parts will be included in the short/long versions.
- Preferred time slot: Please indicate your preference for the morning slot (from 9.15am) or the afternoon slot (from 1:45pm)
- Number of participants: Please specify the maximum number of participants that could reasonably attend and be instructed by the organizers.
- Previous tutorials: Has the tutorial been presented previously? If so, specify the previous venues and years in which the event was held, and provide either a short description or a link to the websites of the previous editions.
The aim with tutorials is that participants can take home knowledge and skills on methods that they can apply to their own research. Priority will be given to tutorials that include hands-on and active learning components. Tutorials should be comprehensive and should not focus only on the presenter’s previous work. We also welcome proposals for tutorials on "disciplinary state of the art sessions" that give a focused overview on the latest developments, trends and perspectives in a specific discipline or research area and any other topics at the intersection of the social sciences, computer science and/or statistics. Tutorials should be of interest to a substantial portion of the community and should represent a sufficiently mature area of research or practice. A regular tutorial slot is 3 hours long. However, we are also accepting proposals for full-day tutorials (6 hours). The full conference registration fee will be waived for one organizer per tutorial.
Topics
In addition to the given list of potential computational social science topics, themes of interest specific for tutorials includes- Application of large language models in CSS research
- Visual communication and data visualizations
- Combining digital trace data and additional data (e.g., surveys)
- Using sensors for studying behavior
- Assessing biases in data collection
- Best practices for working with online communities (including crowdsourcing and participant recruitment)
- Legal and ethical dimensions of CSS research
- Innovative mixed methods for research on socio-technical systems
- Reproducibility in CSS research
- Experimental design and development in CSS
- Research Design and Causal Inference
- Generative AI applications in social science research
Enquiries
For any questions regarding tutorial submissions, please write to: ic2s2.2024@gmail.com
Past Tutorials
The Augmented Social Scientist. Using Recent Advances in NLP to Annotate Millions of Texts with a Human-Level Accuracy
Teachers
- Étienne Ollion, Professor in Sociology at l'École Polytechnique, Paris, France
- Rubing Shen, PhD Candidate at Sciences Po (Médialab) and at l'Institut polytechnique de Paris, France
Description
This tutorial aims to introduce its participants to the logic of transfer learning applied to text data, in order to make them able to carry out their own text analysis projects. We show that a social scientist can, in a limited amount of time, train an algorithm that correctly annotates hundreds of thousands of texts. We will also show that when efficiently trained, the algorithm performs this task better than most humans (who can get tired, bored, or inattentive). The second part will be fully hands-on. We will demonstrate how to use a BERT algorithm on text data. We will use an online interface to walk the participants through each step of the analysis. Finally, we will discuss practical questions that emerge while carrying out the training phase, and we will conclude by briefly evoking the downsides of this approach.Capturing Human Values during Controversies
Teachers
- Yelena Mejova, Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
- Kyriaki Kalimeri, Researcher at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
- Giovanni Da San Martino, Senior Assistant Professor, University of Padova
- Oscar Araque, Assistant Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)
Description
In this tutorial, we give an overview of how the basic human and moral values are interpreted and quantified according to the psychological literature, how they can be assessed from user generated data, and how they may be employed in persuasion and propaganda identification. We will lead a hands-on demonstration of tools for (1) moral value extraction from text, (2) network analysis for opinion clustering, and (3) persuasion techniques identification in two scenarios: the COVID-19 vaccination debate and the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.Data access for researchers under the Digital Services Act
Teachers
- Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
- Julian Jaursch, Project Director at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, Berlin, Germany