Summer Institute for Computational Social Science

Soil:
By: Alfie Chadwick Date: July 5, 2026
Seeds:

Being a techie in the arts can often feel a bit alienating. I straddle two worlds: one where I care about F1 scores and computational complexity, and another where I care about the meaning of truth and the thoughts of long-dead Greek philosophers.

So it was really nice to be part of an emerging community of practice at the two-week Summer Institute for Computational Social Science, where people seemed to share both of these sides, and to think deeply about the field as a whole.

As part of the program, I spent some time working with a team to build a pre-donation visualisation platform to help address the attrition problem in data donation: people want to donate, but aren’t sure what they’re donating, so they don’t. Feel free to check it out on GitHub.