Topic: Big Data, Cloud Computing and the Practice of Computational Social Science
With the rise of the digital society, computational social science holds a whole new prospect for development. The mission of computational social science is that it is no longer the question itself that matters, but the combination of big data and machine learning methods to improve the quality of answering questions and to drive a paradigm shift in social science research. Based on this concept, this lecture focuses on big data types such as social media big data, news opinion big data and digital platform big data, and introduces several practical cases of computational social science research based on the arithmetic power and algorithms of cloud computing.
Presenter: Gong Weigang
Gong Weigang is an Associate Professor at the School of Sociology, Wuhan University, and Director of the Media Big Data Research Centre at Wuhan University. His major research interests include big data and computational social science, digital society and other related research. He has published more than 20 academic papers in high-level Chinese and international journals such as The China Journal, Sociological Studies, CASS Journal of Political Science, Xinhua Digest and Chinese Journal of Population Science. Professor Gong has been a pioneer in introducing big data analytics to the humanities and social sciences in China in recent years, and has published some of the first empirical analyses of big data using cloud computing in China, using Google Cloud's big data resources, computing power resources and various types of machine learning algorithms. His research interests focus on the use of various types of big data resources, including social media big data (Twitter & Weibo) textual big data (Google Books) public opinion big data (GDELT agricultural big data), social perception and social computing, reflecting and portraying the characteristics and operational logic of social systems, trying to combine different perspectives and analytical scales to restart the journey of social discovery from the perspective of big data.
Time: 11:00-12:30 Wednesday, 24 May 2023
Moderator: Gao Sihan (full-time researcher at IIDPF)
Venue: Conference Room 119, Wenqin Building