About this site

What it is, how to cite it, and why these URLs will not move

This is the companion website to Computational & AI-Assisted Methods for Social Sciences: A Research Design Primer by Ji Ma (SAGE).

It is the single place the book’s materials live. That is deliberate: a reader working through a chapter should not have to assemble its resources from a spreadsheet, a repository, and two file-sharing services. Everything is here: environment setup, technique primers, current tool lists, the studies database, worked notebooks with their data, and project templates. All of it is free and needs no account.

Nothing is hosted elsewhere. Where the book once pointed readers to external services for its own materials, those pointers have been retired in favour of addresses on this site.

The division of labour between the book’s theory chapters, its exercise chapters, and this site is set out on the home page.

URL stability policy

The printed book cites addresses on this site. A printed URL cannot be corrected, so every address cited in the book is treated as a permanent commitment for the life of the edition:

  • Cited paths never move. Every address referenced in the book is listed in a manifest that the site’s build checks on every deploy. If a page is reorganized, a redirect stays at the old address.
  • Content behind those addresses is expected to change. That is the point of the site. Tool guides in particular are revised as software changes; each carries a “last reviewed” date.
  • The site is versioned. The state of the site at the book’s publication is tagged in the source repository, so it remains possible to see what a reader would have found at the time of printing.
  • Paths that carry materials are checked too. Because the site is now the only home for the book’s datasets and notebooks, the deploy check covers those file addresses as well as the page addresses, even though the files themselves are not cited in print.

Since this site holds the materials rather than pointing at them, it accepts a trade the previous arrangement avoided: a repository like OSF issues a DOI and guarantees archival retention, and GitHub Pages does neither. The intended remedy is a Zenodo deposit of the site at publication, which yields a citable DOI without changing a single address a reader has.

How to cite

Ma, J. (2026). Computational & AI-Assisted Methods for Social Sciences: A Research Design Primer [Companion website]. https://cssprimer.org

For a specific page, add the page title and the date you accessed it.

Reuse

Site text and code examples may be reused for teaching and research with attribution. Linked tools and cited works carry their own licenses.

Colophon

Built with Quarto and published through GitHub Pages. Code examples are not executed at build time: anything with output was run beforehand and its results committed, so the published numbers are real and the build stays deterministic.

Contact and corrections

Corrections go through the errata page.