Social Data Science

As digital technologies, the internet and social media become increasingly integrated into society, our daily lives generate unprecedented quantities of digital data. These data provide opportunities to study complex social systems in frameworks similar to those of the natural sciences with emphasis on empirical observation of patterns in large-scale data, quantitative modelling and experiments. This ‘social data science’ can generate theory-informed predictive models and underpin the way we understand and solve social problems.

 

Spotlight

Can we predict electoral outcomes from Wikipedia traffic?

Taha Yasseri and Jonathan Bright explore the predictive power of socially generated data.

Wikipedia bots can have fights that last for years, say researchers

Although the online world has become an ecosystem of bots, our knowledge of how they interact with each other is still rather poor.

Turing Lecture: The Data Science of Politics

Recording of Professor Helen Margetts’ Turing Lecture, on how data science can help us understand or even predict increasingly ‘turbulent’ political behaviour.

Alan Turing Institute

We are a contributing department to the Alan Turing Institute (ATI), which will place the UK at the forefront of world-wide research in data science.

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Teaching

The Internet presents huge opportunities for accessing and analysing data around a whole range of human activities: and getting their hands dirty with “real” data is something our Masters students are encouraged to do. Our MSc methods course options cover a whole arc from accessing research data from the social web, to wrangling data, and finally information visualisation and big data analytics.

Students taking these courses have looked at the diffusion of hashtags on Instagram, the use of Twitter for prediction, spread of discourses on social media, the language behind political satire, have analysed the distribution of Wikipedia article length to establish a better measure of language edition size to better understand growth and sustainability of the project, and have investigated popularity patterns of posts on Instagram to model meme virality.

Participate

Join Our Community

There are many ways in which you can join our community including joining our faculty by applying for a new position,  becoming a visitor,  attending our events, or by following us on social media to stay up to date with our latest research, commentary and insights.

Study with us

Study with us at a fully multi-disciplinary centre for Internet-related research, located in the world-leading University of Oxford.

We offer both full-time and part-time courses including an MSc in Social Science of the Internet and a DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences.

Support Our Work

We are proud of the strong relationships we’ve built with our existing funders and are delighted to publicly acknowledge their support. We always seek to engage our sponsors in the department’s activities and would be excited to discuss such opportunities with any new parties interested in supporting our important work.