It’s an exciting time to be in social science. Social media, digital identities and the world of big data has opened up new ways for social scientists to study and examine social phenomenon.

Some examples include using online search patterns to predict the spread of disease, tracking near real-time Twitter data to understand political movements or using location data to understand interpersonal interactions.

The move to a digital world has created a innovative new area of social science called computational social science (CSS).

Computational Social Science boils down to Social Scientists using data processing and data science computation tools (think R, Python etc) to analyze data about people and relationships.