SICSS-Istanbul

Pre-SICSS Tasks
Theory and practise rarely meet in the real world. Therefore instead of writing tutorials which are long, fancy and full with nice codes, we are going to suggest three introductory guides and two abstract case studies, and provide guidance every week till SICSS via zoom and Slack. The tasks cover data collection, cleaning and reporting. We are leaving the analysis to SICSS weeks.

Dinner Talks
While working Pre-SICSS tasks, informal small group dinner talks will be organized to share our experiences, discuss on project ideas, talk about SICSS materials, and chat on participant’s questions.

Meet and Introduce Pre-SICSS Tasks

Small Group Dinner Talks (Optional)

Small Group Dinner Talks (Optional)

Small Group Dinner Talks (Optional)

Small Group Dinner Talks (Optional)

Closing Pre-SICSS and Whole Group Meeting

Discussion Sessions
SICSS Learning materials will be covered during the discussion sessions. Participants will be expected to watch the relevant vidoes on the website before coming to the discussion session. Relevant links can be found on the schedule. The aim is to underline important points in the materials, to discuss participant’s questions and to prepare participants for Tutorial sessions.

Tutorial Sessions
After the discussion sessions, our Lecturers will organize tutorial sessions in which Participants will gain hands-on experience on different methods and will have an opportunity to see how to design a research in computational social science.

Discussion on Ethics

Coffee Break

Tutorial Session: Using Mobile Phones for Human Behaviour Understanding by Albert Ali Salah

Discussion on Digital Trace Data

Coffee Break

Group Project Meetings

SICSS-Duke Guest Speaker: Dan Ariely - Title TBA (optional)

Discussion on Surveys in the Digital Age

Coffee Break

Discussion on Mass Collaboration

Tutorial Session: Automated Text Analysis I by Ahmet Kurnaz

Discussion on Network Analysis

Coffee Break

Tutorial Session: Identifying Networks of Social Bots on Twitter Conversations by Onur Varol

Tutorial Session: Automated Text Analysis II by Ahmet Kurnaz

Discussion on Simulations and Complex Systems

Coffee Break

Tutorial Session: An Agent-Based Model of IMF Program Design by Merih Angin

Projects
This week will be only devoted to work on group projects or individual projects. Participants will be expected to report their progressions every morning and to present their results at the end of the week.

Alumni Talks
During the alumni talks, Participants from last year will talk about their ongoing projects and will share their experiences during and after SICSS-Istanbul.

SICSS Festival
Additonal to SICSS-Istanbul Alumni talks, SICSS-Duke will organize The SICSS Festival in which alumni from all SICSS locations are hosting events such as tutorials, panel discussions, or debates. The only requirement to participate SICSS-Festival is filling the registration form. Detailed information can be found in its website. SICSS-Istanbul participants can find transformed times in this schedule.

Group Project Discussions (Optional)

Coffee and Alumni Talk with Türkoğlu, D., Odabaş, M., Tunaoğlu, D., Yavaş, M.

SICSS Festival: Panel discussion on teaching computational social science (Registration)

Group Project Discussions (Optional)

Coffee and Alumni Talk with Canbolat, S., Kocacik, M.A., Shahin, E.

SICSS Festival: Panel discussion on diversity in computational social science (Registration)

Coffee and Alumni Talk with Asik, G., Kurnaz, A.

Group Project Discussions (Optional)

Tutorial Session: R Markdown by Ahmet Kurnaz

Group Project Discussions (Optional)

Coffee and Alumni Talk with Kekulluoglu, D., Ghmari, S., Sodaci, H.

SICSS Festival: Creating open source software as part of an academic career (Registration)

SICSS-Duke Guest Speaker: Elizabeth E. Bruch - Title TBA (optional)

Presentations

Economic Policy Discussions at a Glance: Textual Analysis of Economy News During Pre and Post- Covid-19
In this project, we examined how the discussion about monetary and fiscal policies is framed by the media with respect to pre- and post- Covid-19 period. We collected data from publicly available and globally known newspapers with a focus on 1-year period by using web scraping techniques. We made word clouds and sentiment analysis among descriptive statistics as preliminary findings. Then, we applied STM and derived some words to apply dictionary analysis. We applied a difference-in-differences (DID) model to the panel data we got. by Cansu Başak, Efe Başlar, F. Saliha Taşpınar, Martin Llada, Osman Gökçe

Turkish Twitter-sphere during Pandemic: Public Opinion Change
This study has been established to determine the effect of the COVID-19 virus, on the agenda of Turkish-speaking Twitter users. In this project, We have used the COVID-19 Twitter Database: Turkey Sample which is the first study to analyse the change in Turkish Twitter-sphere during the pandemic. Around 4.5 million Turkish tweets collected before and after the official announcement of the first coronavirus case in Turkey, 11 March 2020. We will identify bot users and news agencies in the dataset and classify users as real person, bot, and news agency. With the quantitative text analysis techniques, We describe public opinion change. We will investigate how bots behave during pandemic as well as the real users’ and bot users’ interaction through social network analysis. We will look at the agenda setting techniques of news agencies by using quantitative text analysis methods. by Burak Özturan, Betül Özturan

A typology of fact-checking organizations in Turkey
Using Twitter data, we analyzed 6 fact-checking organizations in Turkey. We classified Turkish fact-checking ecosystem by using Quantitative Text Analysis, Network Analysis, and Structural Topic Modelling. Our results reveal the fragmented and diverse structure of fact-checking organizations in Turkey. by Enes Abanoz, Ezgi Siir Kibris, Sadettin Demirel, Tekin Baykiz

Examining On-Line Radical Discourse in Civil War Context, The Case of Salafi Madkhalies Discourse in the Libyan Civil War on Twitter
This research is exploratory in nature and considered to be a pilot study for further inquiries. It aims to examine the discourse and narrative of the Salafi Madkhalies in the social media, in the context of Libyan ongoing civil war. by Leo Bauer & Bilal Salaymeh

Analyzing Covid-19 in Moroccan Newspapers
In our project we investigate the stakeholders that were involved in fighting the corona-virus in Morocco. We collect Moroccan news papers from several websites. Then we use natural language processing to detect and define entities that were involved in fighting the pandemic in Morocco. by Ibtissam Makdoun and Imane Khaouja

Cyber Operations against Australia and Attribution on Twitter
This presentation addresses the problem of attribution of cyber operations. It focuses on the recent cyber attacks against Australia as a case study. The study shows that, although Australian state officials did not name the actor behind the attacks, China emerged as the main culprit, at least in the eyes of the Twitter users. The main conclusion is that the public attribution of cyber attacks is possible even in the absence of hard evidence. by Ozan Ahmet Cetin

Sentiment Analysis of Mentions of “Venezuelan” in Peruvian Newspapers from 2016-2019
by Kyle Beattie

After Party (small breakout rooms)