The workshops will be led by

Camilo Cristancho - a post-doctoral research fellow at the Political Science Department, Universitat de Barcelona. His research focuses on protest, interest groups and social media with an emphasis on political behaviour and public opinion. He works with computational social science, statistical and experimental methods. His most recent projects study public attitudes towards activism (Funded by AGAUR), responsiveness, and affective polarization and public emotions in contentious times. His main publications have appeared in Information, Communication and Society, American Behavioral Scientist, Acta Politica and  Mobilization.

Topic of the workshops

Social Data Analysis: Theories and methods

Description of the workshops

A brief introduction to the Computational Social Science approach Social media has become a normalized source of unlimited public expression about virtually anything. Massive amounts of spontaneously produced open data provide a unique opportunity to study social behavior at a population scale. However, the vast amounts of data and its personal and proprietary nature imply important challenges in the way that we can make the best use of it for scientific purposes.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a starting point for studying this real time trace of interactions; what Lazer et al. (2009) introduce as the precept for a computational social science that “leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale”. The session introduces central examples in the discipline, and presents the major data gathering and analyses techniques. It also discusses the theories, methods, and limitations of big data approaches for social analysis. The workshop is designed for people interested in computational social sciences with varying programming skills.