Myron Gutmann of the NSF gave a talk a few days ago on the implications of computational social science – the slides are “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/Gutmann.pdf (thanks to David Lazer for sharing them). This should be of interest to anyone interested in applying for NSF funding – very clearly, this is going to be a significant research priority over the coming years. The presentation refers to one “new NSF funding initiative”:http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=504747&org=SBE dedicated to building capacity to deal with big data and computationally difficult analysis in the social sciences – it also talks a little bit about the difficulties and frustrations faced by social scientists trying to gear up to deal with the torrents of new data, and the demands that they make on imperfect software (and imperfect social scientists). Very much worth reading.