Building the Future: Excelling in Computational and Quantitative Social Sciences in Turkey

ended

Digitalization of society characterizes the twenty-first century in many aspects of social, political and cultural life. Computational Social Science (CSS) and Quantitative Social Science (QSS) methods have rapidly developed to analyse these digital human traces, and have become the indispensable core of current high impact scientific research in Social Sciences. However, the widening country Turkey severely lacks scientific expertise and capacity in these methods. Therefore, the Koç University (KU) in Istanbul has teamed up with GESIS- Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences from Germany and ISI Foundation- Istituto Interscambio Scientifico (ISI) from Italy to form the project consortium Social ComQuant. The leading institutions GESIS and ISI will share their expertise in CSS and QSS and facilitate to build scientific excellence at KU in these fields. The project will (i) train early stage researchers at KU in CSS and QSS; (ii) increase scientific excellence of faculty members at KU and other Turkish institutions in CSS and QSS; (iii) build a teaching infrastructure for academic curricula in CSS and QSS at KU; and (iv) strengthen joint research collaboration between the consortium members. These objectives will be reached through staff exchanges, summer schools, workshops, expert visits and a virtual training platform that will establish a significant human capacity at KU by facilitating faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students to gain utmost experience in CSS and QSS. This will transform the widening institute KU to a regional hub in Turkey and the wider Middle East region for sociology research on digitalization and big data. Social ComQuant will fulfil the objectives of the Twinning Actions by introducing the promising institute Koç University into the closed group of excellent EU institutes in Social Sciences, increasing the participation of Turkey in European projects and establishing Turkey as an equal partner of the European Research Area.