Workshop Proceedings of the 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: Disrupt, Ally, Resist, Embrace (DARE): Action Items for Computational Social Scientists in a Changing World

DOI: 10.36190/2023.11

Published: 2023-06-01
Disrupt, Ally, Resist, Embrace (DARE): Action Items for Computational Social Scientists in a Changing World
Kokil Jaidka, Eni Mustafaraj, David Schoch, Kenny Joseph

In the past decade, many sophisticated AI-powered systems and tools have been developed and released to the scientific community and the public at large. These technical developments have occurred against a backdrop of political and social upheaval, magnifying and magnified by public health and macro-economic crises. These technical and socio-political changes offer multiple lenses to contextualize (or distort) scientific reflexivity. Further, to computational social scientists who study computer-mediated human behavior, they have implications on what we study and how we study it. How, then, should the ICWSM community members act in such a changing world? Which disruptions should we embrace and which ones should we resist? Whom do we ally with, and for what purpose? In this ICWSM co-located workshop, we invited experience-based perspectives on these questions with the goal of drafting a future, collective research agenda for the computational social science community. We did so via the facilitation of collaborative position papers and the discussion of imminent challenges we face in the context of, for example, proprietary large language models, an increasingly unwieldy peer review processes, and growing issues facing data collection. This document presents a brief summary of the workshop and its outcomes.