To clarify a bit, as this used to be my field when I was an academic...
"Computational Social Science" is a slightly cumbersome term introduced in 2009 [1] that essentially corresponds to using Data Science/Machine Learning/Statistical Mechanics/etc techniques to study questions typically addressed by social scientists. Stuff like:
- Epidemic modeling using cell phone traces
- Social Media data to analyze linguistic trends
- Wikipedia talk pages to analyze consensus formation
- etc...
A somewhat less kind definition is "Physicist cum Data Scientists doing Social Science". You can checkout some of the leaders in the field on Google Scholar [2]
Maybe it's just me, but when I hear "computational social science" I first think of agent-based modeling. But yes, when I look at recent work, it's all about statistical analysis of historical data. Ugh... So why can't we just call it that? Maybe it's justified to emphasize the computational aspect because of the scale of operation these days.
Ah, yes... that's the original version of Computational Social Science before the Physicists came into the science. You're probably familiar with R. Axelrod's work [1], and J. Epstein has an excellent book on it[1] C. Cioffi-Revilla has another excellent book that tries to straddle/review both sides of the fence: [2]
Maybe I'm in the minority but as a physicist it makes perfect sense to model micro-interactions to estimate emergent macro-scale patterns. What is your experience with "physicists" in the derogatory?
Three issues to distinguish here. Parent is referring to a change in usage of "computational social science" from meaning agent-based modeling to meaning statistical data analysis. This change in usage may have been driven by physicists moving into social science.
You ask about modeling based on micro-interactions, which parent mentioned but did not comment on.
You seem to ask why social scientists might be skeptical of physicists contributing to social science. My observation is that physicists tend to be extremely naive about the high dimensionality and nonlinearity of social science phenomena.
Agent-based modeling is a form of modeling which explicates micro interactions to imply macro patterns. That is the connection here.
Your comment looks like it was written by ChatGPT. It misses basic implications about agent-based modeling and has a lot of emphasis on "you seem to mean..." phrasing. Am I close, and if not, was this intentional?
I'm a physics PhD... so it's a bit of self-deprecating humor. As a wise man once said, the 10 scariest words for a social scientist are, "I'm from the Physics department, and I'm here to help".
On a slightly more serious note, Physicists (and I've certainly been guilty of this as well) aren't always humble enough to learn why a specific field does things the way they do before immediately trying to impose their own approach (Ising models all the way down!)
"Computational Social Science" is a slightly cumbersome term introduced in 2009 [1] that essentially corresponds to using Data Science/Machine Learning/Statistical Mechanics/etc techniques to study questions typically addressed by social scientists. Stuff like:
- Epidemic modeling using cell phone traces
- Social Media data to analyze linguistic trends
- Wikipedia talk pages to analyze consensus formation
- etc...
A somewhat less kind definition is "Physicist cum Data Scientists doing Social Science". You can checkout some of the leaders in the field on Google Scholar [2]
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1167742
[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_au...