In recent years, social scientists have gained access to previously unimaginable quantities of social data and computing power. This has unlocked new opportunities to reveal hidden truths about social movements, power, inequality, technology and politics.
But it has also raised challenges and important ethical questions. How should data about human behavior be tracked? What are the risks of increased surveillance? How can algorithms be better designed to mitigate human biases? And how can social scientists keep up with the explosive growth of big data?
The Centre for Computational Social Science is launching at UBC this fall with an aim to address these questions and also to serve as an intellectual and pedagogical hub for cutting edge computational social science scholarship. Housed in the Faculty of Arts, the Centre will promote interdisciplinary scholarship within and between social science disciplines, focusing on how data and computation can advance our understanding of society, but also how data and computation are implicated in forms of power and inequality.
“In the blink of an eye our social and cultural world has metamorphosed with technological innovations rapidly transforming our social world – from how and with whom we interact, to how we identify, how we shop and how we play and create. Computational social science has contributed insights into questions around the diversity of human languages and how we communicate globally, what it means to be human, and what we value as a society.”
Sociology professor Dr. Laura Nelson is the inaugural director of the Centre. In her own work, she has used computational techniques to uncover why gender inequality persists in academia, startups, and the healthcare sector; whose histories are left out of Wikipedia; and how the media’s coverage of environmental activism has shifted over the past two decades.
We spoke to Dr. Nelson about what the Centre hopes to achieve and why computational methods will be key to solving the societal issues we will face in the future.
Dr. Laura Nelson, Director of the Centre for Computational Social Science
Dr. Laura Nelson, Director of the Centre for Computational Social Science
What do you hope to achieve with this new Centre?
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the future of social science, and indeed, society itself, is computational. The amount of social data we now have access to is staggering, and it’s often unstructured, meaning it’s in the form of messy texts, audio, images, maps, and other formats. The amount and the new form of social data we can now access presents amazing opportunities, but also requires new methods to process and analyze. In addition to these opportunities, data and computation are increasingly governing access to resources in society, with implications for equal access to resources and life chances.
Each social science discipline is tackling this future in their own way, but there are common issues and questions across disciplines. The Centre will create support networks so faculty and students can share knowledge about ways to access new forms of data, ways to store, structure and analyze that data, and how to best advance our own disciplines using computational methods. We will work with other computationally-minded units and centers on campus, including (but not limited to) Data Science @ UBC, CAIDA, and the Public Humanities Hub, which are all tackling similar issues related to data and computation. The social sciences have something unique to offer these ongoing conversations, including how human biases get encoded into data and algorithms, and how data, algorithms, and computation can be (re)designed to better align with various notions of the social good.
“The social sciences have something unique to offer these ongoing conversations, including how human biases get encoded into data and algorithms, and how data, algorithms, and computation can be (re)designed to better align with various notions of the social good.”
“The social sciences have something unique to offer these ongoing conversations, including how human biases get encoded into data and algorithms, and how data, algorithms, and computation can be (re)designed to better align with various notions of the social good.”
What is computational social science?
Computational social science uses computational techniques, such as machine learning and natural language processing, to analyze and extract insight from large amounts of social data — anything from historical archival documents, to websites, to social media, to data collected from apps used in workplaces.
Why is computational social science research important?
In the blink of an eye our social and cultural world has metamorphosed with technological innovations rapidly transforming our social world – from how and with whom we interact, to how we identify, how we shop and how we play and create. Computational social science has contributed insights into questions around the diversity of human languages and how we communicate globally, what it means to be human, and what we value as a society.
With this opportunity also comes social challenges, including complex challenges around data ownership, ownership transference, legal protocols, intellectual property rights, and general ethics around studying humans on a large scale. In addition to insights about society, social scientists are asking what it means to live in a society where data, computation, and algorithms are increasingly governing the liberties we might have, and in this new society, what it means if people are discriminated against. Whether computation leads to more or fewer liberties, more or less discrimination, depends on what we do with it. As computation and society become increasingly intertwined, social scientists must be part of the global conversation.
Why is the Centre launching now?
Social scientists, who are dedicated to studying almost every facet of the human condition are scrambling to keep up with the explosive growth of new or “big data” opportunities and challenges. There are many groups and researchers at UBC, in the Faculty of Arts and beyond, doing this work. It’s time we provide a network of support and additional resources for these scholars, to shape the future of research and the future role of computation in shaping society.
What activities will the Centre be undertaking?
We plan to offer a space for faculty and students to connect across disciplines through regular meetings where we share our projects and find common threads among our work, we will bring leading computational social science scholars to campus (in person and virtually) to advance national and global conversations, and we will hold workshops and other pedagogical events so both faculty and students can continue their training in cutting edge methods and access to the infrastructure necessary for computational social science research and the the study of ethics around that research.
For students interested in computational social science, Sociology 280: Data and Society is taught by Dr. Laura Nelson. The class (offered in Term 2) examines the impacts of changing information and communication technologies on societies and social interactions.
