This eScience Summer School is a one-week intensive induction into computational
social science (CSS) tools and methods for social scientist and policy scholars. It is designed for students, practitioners, and faculty seeking an introduction to CSS without requiring prior expertise. The program provides hands-on experience across four core areas: social networks, spatial data, text analysis, and agent-based simulation
There are no prerequisites to take this school and there is no credit offered. The school costs $100. UW faculty, staff, students (undergraduates and graduates) may be eligible for a scholarship. You will have a chance to request a scholarship during the application process.
The deadline to apply is July 17th, 2026
Summer School 2026 classes will be held in person
from August 10th to 13th
Contents
Session 1: August 10th, 10am – 1pm
Social Network Analysis. Participants learn network representation, centrality measures, community detection, and machine learning approaches to link prediction. The examples include the use of Python, R and Gephi.
Session 2: August 11th, 3pm – 6pm
Text Data. From text preprocessing to latent concepts. Covering tokenization, vectorization, topic
modelling, and machine learning for text classification.
Session 3: August 12th, 10am – 1pm
Spatial Data Analytics. From basic maps to spatial modelling. Vector-based spatial visualization, coordinate systems, spatial decisions, and spatial modeling.
Session 4: August 13th, 3pm – 6pm
Agent-Based Simulation. From chaos to policy decisions. Design and execution of agent-based models, sensitivity analysis, and machine learning for parameter exploration.
About the Director of the Winter School
Professor Jose Manuel Magallanes, PhD has served as a Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute since 2015. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance and the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington from 2015 to 2025.
He is currently a Full Professor of Political Science and Government in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and the Director of the Institute for Social Analytics and Strategic Intelligence (PULSO-PUCP). He is also a Part-Time Professor in the Department of Juridical and Political Sciences at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Additionally, he is a Lecturer in the Master’s Program in Data Analytics and Computational Social Science at UMass Amherst . He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Duke University, Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).
Professor Magallanes holds a PhD in Computational Social Science from George Mason University. His academic credentials also include a PhD in Psychology from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), an M.A. in Political Science from PUCP, and a BSc in Computer Science from UNMSM
Acknowledgment Section
The Winter School is offered free of charge thanks to the support of the eScience Institute and its funding partners. Professor Magallanes acknowledges that the material was developed thanks to his visiting appointments at the UW’s eScience Institute, the Department of Sociology at UW, and the Evans School at UW, as well as the work he conducts at PULSO PUCP