A guide to organizing research groups, events, and activities surrounding the use of computational methods to answer social science questions.
Josephine Lukito
Computational methodology is a growing area of scholarship across many social science disciplines. As a naturally interdisciplinary endeavor, social science researchers using computational methods are used to collaborating with others to answer research questions at the intersection of multiple fields.
However, computational methods are also relatively new to the social sciences (insofar as methods are concerned). That means, relative to other methods, there is less "institutional infrastructure" in the form of discipline-specific tools like textbooks, classes, and journals. That is not to say this will not be expanded in the future--in the field of Communication, for example, the rise of computational special calls and the inaugural issue of the Computational Communication Research journal signal increasing interest in computational methods. However, the time it takes to build academic infrastructure (e.g., propose classes, write textbooks) to facilitate computational methods research is far outpaced by the interest in the methodology. In other words: there are tons of young scholars who want to learn computational methods, and not a lot of infrastructure upon which they can begin to do so.
Where do young scholars go? Often, they take courses outside of the discipline or teach themselves how to use these methods (using online tutorials and lots of StackOverflow searches). Sometimes, graduate students are fortunate enough to have one or two computational scholars in their department to guide them through this learning process. While these are all excellent and useful strategies, they do not necessarily facilitate the collaborative experience one typically expects from programming endeavors.
It is from this need that I advocate for the research group, online or offline communities that meet regularly to learn about computational methods, engage in research with computational methods, or both. Computational methods research groups (CMRGs) can be online or offline. They can be limited to a department or campus or can expand throughout a city. You can even organize a CMRG that meets online.
There are two important prerequisites to a CMRG. A computational methods research group should:
- meet regularly. This can be weekly or monthly meetings (technically, you can also meet regularly once a year, but I recommend meeting at least once a month).
- have specific goals. Often, these goals are focused on (1) education and/or (2) research. Events that you organize should be geared towards achieving those goals.
The purpose of this guide is to provide you with some resources and tips for organizing and managing your own research group.
Perhaps you're looking for a community of computational scholars in your city. Maybe you're hoping to connect specifically with Python coders living in the Northeast who are interested in NLP. Or you could be a graduate student who has no computational methods course in her department. All of these are good reasons for starting research groups.
Our subfield is young, which means there is a lot of potential for young scholars to take the initiative and organize events and activities surrounding computational methods. Through these actions, we can build a denser network of computational scholars and build resources that can be later institutionalized into courses, research centers, journals, publications, and other output.
Anyone. If you are interested in computational methods, and you want to organize a regular get-together, that is a CMRG. Graduate students, full professors, non-academics, industry professionals--you are all welcome to build CMRGs. Importantly, you do not need to be a computational expert in order to organize a computational methods research group.
Organizing a research group has as much to do with being able to organize events and manage details as it does with being able to code. Being able to schedule meetings, recruit members, and maintain a workflow is important to many coding projects. Therefore, you do not need to be an expert in computational methods to organize a research group. Similarly, being great at programming does not make you an inherently good research group organizer.
First, go to the starting-here folder. This will have all our basic resources for thinking about how to structure and organize your CMRG.
Once you've narrowed down the scope and goal of your research group, it's time to think about the events you want to organize, and the ways in which you want to recruit members.
Finally, it's up to you to execute your plan: recruit members, run the event, and evaluate what you've done.
Josephine Lukito is a Ph. D Student at UW-Madison. She led the UW-Madison SJMC Computational Methods Research Group from 2016 to 2019. You can learn more about the research group here.