14. The Past Decade of Computational Social Science Research with David Lazer

Diaries of Social Data Research

In this episode, we talk with David Lazer, the University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and the Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. We discuss two seminal papers in computational social science he co-authored a decade apart: "Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science" (Science 2009) and "Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities" (Science 2020).

David shares with us events in his long and distinguished CSS research career. In the early 2000s, he helped gather a small group of people working on new "data streams" and how they intentionally created the term computational social science. He also talks about his own struggles on the academic job market, advice for aspiring CSS researchers, and a wish for better data availability structures.