International Research in Computational Social Sciences (completed)

Objective

In recent years, what has come to be termed the "digitalization" of society has led to fundamental social, political, and economic changes. The "digital revolution" has also had significant effects on social research, as the development and usage of new media devices and technologies has generated an abundance of data about human behavior which can be used for further research. On the one hand, this opens up new opportunities for social science research; on the other hand, it also involves methodological and methodical challenges. These new developments offer an extensive breadth of potential research questions within the thematic field of the "Computational Social Sciences", the exploration of which the Foundation would like to support.

The Foundation not only intends to support the further advancement of this field, but also explicitly aims at supporting the development of international networks between scholars based in Germany and abroad as well as the further training of junior researchers – from the level of Master’s to postdoc.

Scope of Funding

The focus of this call is on the exploration of socially relevant research questions. The Foundation supports both international workshops and summer schools (also as series of up to three summer schools) as well as international research cooperations of up to four postdoctoral researchers; any proposal submitted must address socially important topics, which can be explored using (new) tools and methods offered by the "Computational Social Sciences". Project teams can be interdisciplinary, but a social scientist must always be involved.

Details of conditions and the application procedure can be found under "Information for Applicants 107" (pdf). Applications must be written in English and filed electronically via the application portal.

Background

This call is set in the context of a range of activities established by the Foundation with regards to the thematic field "Big Data/Digitalisation of the society". Following the Herrenhausen Conferences on "Digital Humanities" (2013) and "Big Data in a Transdisciplinary Perspective" (2015), the Foundation decided to support this dynamic and still rapidly developing field of "Computational Social Sciences".