Computational Social Science: A Concise Description

A paper by Dr. Cioffi-Revilla was released on Research Gate a little over a year ago. At thirty-seven pages it is a succinct description of the Computational Social Science (CSS) field. The paper titled, "The Scope of Computational Social Science" makes these key points:

1. CSS is by nature:
   1. An empirical science.
   2. A social science.
   3. A computational science.
2. Computational models are scientific laws stated mathematically.
3. Laws describe and theories explain.
4. Models with high dimensional data may require simulations using a reduced number of parameters.
5. CSS is enabled and informed by computation.
6. CSS core:
   1. Computational foundation.
   2. Algorithmic information extraction.
   3. Networks.
   4. Social complexity.
   5. Social simulations.

The paper serves as a reminder of why a "restrictive version of CSS" that has been proposed by relative newcomers to the field is a disservice to those interested in the field. CSS is about more than the Big Data found in today's social science data sets and the computational needs of its analysis. As Dr. Cioffi-Revilla points out, theories are needed to explain any computational findings in social science's big data.

Note: The final version of the paper was released as a chapter in the book below:

Cite: Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2021). The scope of computational social science. In Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1 (pp. 17-32). Routledge.