Moving to a new home...

I've been blogging at http://lowlywonk.blogspot.com for most of my time in grad school, and now it's time for a change.  I'm still interested in public policy, but my so much of work is computational now.  It just makes more sense to have "computational" in the name of the blog.

So please point your blog readers to http://compSocSci.blogspot.com so the adventure can continue.

(The contents of this blog will remain online, searchable, etc. for the forseeable future.)

The world's fastest demo for RStudio in EC2

Last week I posted instructions to get started with RStudio on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Here are new and improved* instructions (docx, pdf). These steps should be enough to get you into the cloud in 15 minutes or less, for free.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any trouble or questions with this demo. I'm trying to lower the startup costs for people to do computational social science, so I'm happy to be a resource for others working their way down the cloud computing path.

Cheers!

PS - The instance comes with several fun R libraries pre-installed: tm, igraph, and twitteR.

*I've 1) dropped several steps that aren't necessary for running RStudio, 2) added a few screenshots, and 3) clarified a steps that were giving people trouble. Thanks again to Kevin J. for putting together the original slides.

+Computation: Got an AWS in Education grant!

I just received a generous grant for usage on Amazon's Web Services -- cloud computing, storage space, and bandwidth. This is just in time for a bunch of heavy-duty text crunching I've been planning to do. Thank you, Amazon!

Resources from PolNets

Note from Saturday, at the Political Networks conference. The presentation went swimmingly. I think there are more sociologists than political scientists here today.

Here are links to nifty resources referenced in talks:

Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW): http://csea.phhp.ufl.edu/Media.html#bottommedia

Networks, Computation, and Social Dynamics Lab at UC Irvine: http://www.ncasd.org/public_html/

OpenCongress RSS feeds: http://www.opencongress.org/about/rss

Public.Resource.Org: https://public.resource.org/

Slides from JITP: The Future of Computational Social Science

I'm at JITP's conference on the future of computational social science this week. Really interesting gathering of social scientists (and a smattering of CS people) interested in computational social science. I'll blog more thoughts on the conference once it's over (tonight).

For now, I'll post the resource I already have put together: my conference slides.

An Automated Snowball Census of the Political Web - JITP 2011

View more presentations from Abe Gong

Computational social scientists: a draft directory and basic survey results

Last week, some of us* at Michigan's Center for Complex Systems circulated a survey of computational social scientists -- trying to find out who self-identifies as a compSocSci person and what they study, so that they can be in touch with each other.

We had just under 100 responses, from people at many different institutions, working in a wide variety of areas. Here are some early results.

First, the obligatory word cloud. This isn't particularly scientific, but it illustrates the concepts that people find important in this space. Not surprisingly, we had a strong showing from network people and agent-based modelers.




We also asked about broad areas where people had formal training and were currently working. The two are pretty similar, so I'll just show the graph on training.


More results, and a revised version of the directory will be forthcoming in a couple weeks. Please let us know if you have any questions. We hope these will be useful resources for the community.

Click here to take the survey. We'll keep it open for another couple weeks, so that responses can continue to trickle in.

Click here for the directory in pdf format. (To avoid spam, this doesn't include email addresses. Email me if you want a copy that includes emails.)

* Scott Page, Dan Katz, and I

Working paper: An automated snowball census of the political web

Here's my paper for the JITP Future of Computational Social Science conference in a couple weeks. This paper describes my process for using SnowCrawl and a highly trained text classifier to search out political web sites -- pretty much all of them -- on the web.

Final census results are available here. I'm planning to run another iteration of this census before too long. I welcome comments and suggestions.

Computational politics: U.S. House legislation may move to XML?

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/158339-boehner-cantor-want-house-to-use-open-data-formats

This would be a huge boon to computational social scientists and groups like the Sunlight Project