SICSS-Stellenbosch

8–26 June 2020 | Stellenbosch University | Virtual Event

Schedule & Materials

Schedule Overview
  • SICSS-Stellenbosch is held virtually using a combination of asynchronous video lectures, semi-synchronous group exercises and synchronous group feedback sessions. Each day follows roughly the same schedule, as shown in this section.

  • Morning
    Approximately 2h of video lectures to be watched privately to prepare for the afternoon and evening sessions.

  • Afternoon
    Group exercise to be completed in small groups of participants using Slack and Zoom to coordinate and work through the exercise.

  • Evening (17:30-18:30)
    One-hour synchronous session with all participants to review the day’s activities.

Week One: Introduction to R
  • About the Exercises
    It is important that you work through the chapters completely to understand all of the important concepts (both those covered in the session and the rest covered in the chapter). Afterwards, we have extracted a number of relevant exercises from the chapter to work through. For these exercises you can use the provided notebooks and data here to get started (download the full repo as a zip file). While the solutions for the exercises can be found on the Internet, we encourage you to work through the exercises using the chapter first to get used to solving problems with R.

  • Accompanying Notebooks and Data: View on GitHub.

Monday June 8, 2020
  • 09:00-10:00 Welcome and Introduction

  • Introduction to R and R Studio
    Watch the Video on YouTube.

  • This session is based around chapters 2, 4, 6, and 8 of R 4 Data Science. It is important that you work through the chapters completely to understand the basics of working in R before we move forward with more advanced concepts. First, as shown in the video, download and install R and Rstudio. There are no exercises for this session, your task is to get setup with R and RStudio and work through the relevant chapters before we start working with the tidyverse tomorrow.

  • Relevant Chapters: Chapter 2, Chapter 4, Chapter 6, Chapter 8.

Tuesday June 9, 2020
Wednesday June 10, 2020
Thursday June 11, 2020
Friday June 12, 2020
Week Two: Introduction to Computational Social Science
Monday June 15, 2020
Tuesday June 16, 2020
Wednesday June 17, 2020
Thursday June 18, 2020
Friday June 19, 2020
Week Three: SICSS Festival and Guest Lectures
  • The SICSS Festival 2020 will take place Monday, June 22 - Friday, June 26, 2020. During the festival, alumni from all SICSS locations are hosting events such as tutorials, panel discussions, or debates. Additional guest lectures for SICSS-Stellenbosch participants will also take place during this time. Events that are part of the festival require prior registration. More information is available at the associated link.

  • Full Information on the SICSS Festival

  • Details of Guest Lectures to be posted in due course.

Monday June 22, 2020
  • (Festival) Panel discussion on teaching computational social science. Registration.

Tuesday June 23, 2020
  • (Festival) Panel discussion on diversity in computational social science. Registration.

Wednesday June 24, 2020
  • (Festival) Using Empirica for high-throughput virtual lab experiments. Limited participation, see.

Thursday June 25, 2020
  • (Festival) Creating open source software as part of an academic career. Registration.

Friday June 26, 2020
  • (Festival) Opportunities and challenges with industry collaborations. Registration.

Host a Location

You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency.

Learn More