The methods cluster brings together faculty and students with a shared interest in traditional sociological methods and newly emerging computational social science methods. Members in the cluster seek to employ and improve these methods by integrating social dimensions with spatial dimensions to address substantive social science problems. The blending of small data from social surveys or field experiments with large-scale data from social media, dynamic networks, mobility trajectories, and social simulations to provide new sociological insights is encouraged.

This cluster will work closely with the Computational Social Science Laboratory in Faculty of Social Science to run seminars/webinars with speakers from the academy and industry to discuss and consider the critical sociological questions with which the research continues to grapple, and the cutting-edge methods and new types of data (or big data) with which actionable social knowledge can be elicited.