The main topic of the 1st Social ComQuant Summer School will be the analysis of behavioral digital trace data. Digital traces such as social media posts, search engine queries, mobile phone records, and co-purchases are increasingly allowing social and computational scientists the analysis of human behavior at high spatial and temporal resolution.

The COVID-19 pandemic will provide the context of the summer school. Public health advice, stay-at-home orders, and self-imposed limitations have dramatically changed human behaviors on a global scale. For the first time in an epidemic, changes in human behavior have been monitored through digital platforms in real-time. Digital trace data has provided epidemiologists, public health officials, and social scientists with new tools to study the impact of interventions against the virus and how society is changing during the course of the pandemic.

The aim of the summer school is to showcase different examples of how behavioral digital trace data from various sources (social media, location data, news, participatory surveillance) have been used in the fight of COVID-19 and in understanding how society is being affected by the consequences of the pandemic.

A group of outstanding keynote speakers and lecturers will teach different methods to capture, analyze and interpret digital trace data and how these can help investigate the interplay between human dynamics and the epidemic spread. 

Topics of the lectures will include:

• Human mobility from digital traces
• Social media and the spread of misinformation
• Search engine query data 
• Online surveys through social media marketing platforms
• Digital contact tracing

The lectures will focus on methodological approaches and previous experience in epidemiology or public health is not required to attend the School.