Sociology on the Internet
Between the 8th and 11th of June, the International Conference on Computational Social Science was held in Helsinki. The conference was organized by the Aalto University.
The researchers in the area of computational social science use modern digital computational methods for processing the data on social systems and their dynamics, which are based on large arrays of data obtained through data mining or by creating mass online experiments. This field has attracted not just programmers but also researchers from many different areas: sociology, economics, psychology, mathematics, and physics.
The first conference of this title gathered many participants; eminent researchers in the field of the studies on the modern digital society were among the key speakers. The organizers noted that the quality of all submitted applications was very high, but due to time constraints they had to reject about one third of the applications. The accepted proposals amounted to 330 presentations divided between parallel and poster sessions, and 12 plenary presentations.
The St. Petersburg Department of HSE was presented at the conference by six participants with three presentations. Daniel Alexandrov, Vadim Voskresensky, Alexey Gorgadze, and Ilya Musabirov made two poster presentations on their analysis of the Russian social network VKontakte.
Their posters were well received by their colleagues. In particular, the poster by Alexandrov and Gorgadze on relationship between ethnic groups in the VKontakte network got a special mention in a plenary speech by Andreas Flache (Groeningen) on polarization in social networks. It should be noted that two of our participants and co-authors were the HSE students: Alexey is studying at the first year of the Magister program, and Vadim is a student of the 4th year of the Bachelor program on sociology.
Daniel Alexandrov: "The study of complex social systems and their dynamics requires a huge amount of computation power, both for collecting the data and for making forecasts in the social sphere. We know that weather forecasts is an extremely complicated matter, which requires enormous amounts of data that need to be processed in real time. Currently, the social science is going through revolutionary changes, similar to those that happened some time ago in meteorology and climatology, and, more recently, in biology and genetics. The algorithmic biology has been existing for a while now, and now we see the emergence of the algorithmic economy. The human population is leaving massive digital footprints; their movements are being constantly recorded by mobile communications towers, by the streams of Twitter messages, and their Internet searches on availability of a medicine in the nearest pharmacy leave a trail in the search engines. There’s no doubt that quite soon the computational social science will take a leading role both in the analysis of the real economy, and in the analysis of socio-political processes. Just look at the numerous articles on computational social science in such magazines as Science and Nature, and at the interest they generate. At the conference, the editors of these two magazines took part in a special panel that discussed the future of this huge area.”