Computational social science and social computing

Abstract

Computational social science is an emerging research area at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences, in which novel computational methods are used to answer questions about society. The field is inherently collaborative: social scientists provide vital context and insight into pertinent research questions, data sources, and acquisition methods, while statisticians and computer scientists contribute expertise in developing mathematical models and computational tools. New, large-scale sources of demographic, behavioral, and network data from the Internet, sensor networks, and crowdsourcing systems augment more traditional data sources to form the heart of this nascent discipline, along with recent advances in machine learning, statistics, social network analysis, and natural language processing. The related research area of social computing deals with the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems, examining questions such as how and why people contribute user-generated content and how to design systems that better enable them to do so. Examples of social computing systems include prediction markets, crowdsourcing markets, product review sites, and collaboratively edited wikis, all of which encapsulate some notion of aggregating crowd wisdom, beliefs, or ideas—albeit in different ways. Like computational social science, social computing blends techniques from machine learning and statistics with ideas from the social sciences. For example, the economics literature on incentive design has been especially influential.