Resource list

Readings, courses, and materials that go beyond this book

Readings this book cites and builds on, plus courses and tools: where to go next when the primer’s research-design level is not deep enough.

These readings develop ideas the book draws on, from research design and measurement to visual communication. Coverage is selective; each entry identifies the chapters it supports.

Foundational texts

  • Salganik, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (2017): free online. Read it alongside Chapters 3 and 4 for further discussion of research design with digital data.
  • Grimmer, Roberts & Stewart, Text as Data (2022): a detailed treatment of computational text analysis; the source of the five-task framework in Chapter 1 and the structural-versus-agnostic distinction in Chapter 7.
  • Gentzkow & Shapiro, Code and Data for the Social Sciences (2014): free PDF. Short and practical; the backbone of Chapter 4’s workflow section.
  • Kirk, Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design (2019): the four-stage design process that structures the visualization work in Chapters 9 and 10.
  • Schwabish, Better Data Visualizations (2021): the source of the visual encoding hierarchy in Chapter 9.
  • Franconeri et al., “The Science of Visual Data Communication” (Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2021): DOI. The evidence behind Chapter 9 on encoding accuracy, truncated axes, and uncertainty displays.

AI-assisted research

These articles support the discussions of coding and synthetic data in Chapters 6 and 7.

  • Stuhler, Ton & Ollion, “From Codebooks to Promptbooks” (SMR, 2025): DOI. The source of the promptbook framing in Chapter 6.
  • Bisbee et al., “Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data?” (Political Analysis, 2024): DOI. The variance-collapse finding in Chapter 7.
  • Broska, Howes & van Loon, “The Mixed Subjects Design” (SMR, 2025): DOI. Combining human and model observations while retaining the distinction between the two sources.

Courses and tutorials

  • SICSS: the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science. Materials from past years support further study and teaching.
  • The Turing Way: a community handbook on reproducible research.

Data sources

See the data management tool guide for the maintained repository list.