All tutorials

The IC2S2 conference starts with one day of tutorials on July 17
Consult the program for times and room numbers.
All participants can attend the tutorial of their first choice.


Introduction to Agent-Based Computational Modelling in Social Science (full day)
André Grow, Daniel Ciganda, Robert Stelter and Emilio Zagheni

In this tutorial we give an introduction to Agent-Based Computational Modelling in Social Science. How does social science research benefit from agent-based computational modelling? – A question highlighted in this tutorial. Furthermore, we introduce participants to NetLogo as a tool for designing agent-based models. Finally, participants learn about advanced topics that they are likely to encounter when implementing their own models.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Measuring and Modeling Language Change (morning)
Ian Stewart, Sandeep Soni and
 Jacob Eisenstein

Questions about language change are fundamental to the social sciences and humanities, and scholars in these disciplines are increasingly turning to computational techniques for answers. This tutorial will facilitate this convergence by surveying techniques such as vector autoregressive models, dynamic topic models, dynamic word embeddings, and interrupted time-series models for causal inference.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Computational Analysis of Political Texts: Bridging Research Efforts Across Communities (morning)
Goran Glavaš, Federico Nanni and Simone Paolo Ponzetto

This tutorial will provide an overview of the body of work on computational analysis of political texts from both the NLP and political science communities. We cover available resources, methods for topical analysis and text scaling of political texts, as well as their applications to detect ideology and positioning using text as data.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Introduction to Network Science (morning)
Yérali Gandica

Introductory tutorial aimed at any researcher interested in starting into the fields of Network Science. We will begin by installing some basic packages and talking about elemental notions. However, the level of learning will be quickly progressing, addressing the key topics, until arriving at the current subjects of research.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Computational Models for Social and Information Network Analysis (morning)
Jie Tang

This tutorial introduces how to apply computational models (e.g., deep learning) for social and information network analysis. Uniquely, it aims to provide the audience with 1) our experience in translating network research into Web & mobile applications in WeChat, Tencent Games, Alibaba, & AMiner, and 2) the public Open Academic Graph with 400 million nodes and 3 billion links for open research.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Modeling Human Values with Social Media (morning)
Yelena Mejova and Kyriaki Kalimeri

Human and moral values shape our views of the world, influencing our attitudes towards important social issues. This tutorial brings to light latest research on modeling and predicting human values from digital footprints. We also discuss how individual, societal, and cultural values can be utilized in the design of persuasive technologies, promoting fairness, sensitivity and inclusion.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Developing High-Quality Linguistic Corpora for Analysing Highly Subjective Phenomena (afternoon)
Valerio Basile and Komal Florio

Methods for the creation of high-quality datasets, in particular from natural language data. The tutorial focuses on a survey of agreement metrics, annotation techniques such as crowdsourcing, and leveraging of controversiality and polarization of opinions. An exercise will be included, to provide hands-on experience with annotation techniques.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Structural topic models for enriching quantitative text analysis (afternoon)
Cornelius Puschmann and Carsten Schwemmer

In this tutorial, we introduce participants to structural topic models (STM) and the associated R package as a particular robust and fully-featured implementation of topic models that offers many advantages over standard LDA. We demonstrate how predictions made by STM may be systematically enriched by integrating contextual variables such as gender, activity and political leanings.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Analysis of Multiplex Social Networks (hands-on) (afternoon)
Matteo Magnani and Obaida Hanteer

In multiplex networks actors are connected through different types of edges (“co-workers”, “friends”, etc.). They have a huge potential for the study of complex online relations. This hands-on tutorial introduces the R multinet library for the analysis of multiplex networks. Only basic knowledge of R is required.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Experimental Social Networks: Designing and Conducting Large-Scale Experiments on Networks using Crowdsourcing (afternoon)
Mohsen Mosleh

In this tutorial, we will discuss best practices for designing and conducting online social network experiments where human subjects (and programmed bots) interact simultaneously within a specified network structure. We will show how the experimental design can be informed by computational models in an iterative process.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.


Computational Social Science of Science (afternoon)
Dashun Wang and Lu Liu

The science of science is an emerging field that uses computational tools to quantify the patterns underlying scientific relationships and dependencies from the explosion of data in science. In this tutorial, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the field, including recent studies on scientific ideas, individual careers and teams from the perspective of computational social science.

For more information regarding the tutorial, you can visit the tutorial website.