State-of-the-art multidisciplinary research methods are supported by the newly established Social Science Computer Science Group at the KRTK
To support the expansion of empirical research opportunities and the proliferation of modern research ecosystems, the Social Science Computing Group has been established at the ELKH Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (KRTK). The aim of the group is to enable researchers to apply the data and infrastructure management tools that have been developed in the 2010s to social science research more widely.
Building on the culture of Data Science, the Social Science Computing Group will expand the empirical research opportunities available at the KRTK through its activities based on a modern open source ecosystem. We will support the uptake of scripting languages (R and Python), big data tools based on parallelised distributed systems (dask and ray) and version control systems (such as git and dvc) within the research centre.
The aim of the newly created group is to create and maintain a diverse set of complex large databases that can be used to conduct reproducible, extensible multidisciplinary research in collaboration with KRTK researchers and external collaborations. They will also develop scalable and generalisable computational tools for data processing on human behaviour, geographical characteristics, organisational behaviour, social networks or similar topics relevant to the community of the research centre. They will also aim to establish rules, processes and infrastructure for accessing and sharing data, to connect researchers from different fields who may benefit from similar data or data processing methods, and to develop systems that will automatically update the retrieved data and the research projects based on them on a continuous basis.
These databases are created by channelling and processing researcher data needs and are based on the collection and organisation of publicly available data or the processing of purchased data.
Further information is available on the Group’s own website in English.