Apologies for cross-posting


CALL FOR PAPER
for a special issue of the international journal
"INFORMATICA E DIRITTO" of the National Research Council of Italy -
Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques

on:

“LAW AND COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE”

editors:
Sebastiano Faro and Nicola Lettieri

Over the past 50 years, the advances in information science and
technologies, together with the emergence of new scientific paradigms,
not least that represented by complexity science, have significantly
transformed the study of human beings and societies.

Social sciences have witnessed the gradual rise of a new approach to
research through which the explanation of social phenomena is mediated
not only by verbally expressed theories, but by the use of the formal
and operational language of computation, by simulations and by the use
of advanced technologies. This approach promises to bridge the gap
between natural sciences, on the one hand, and social sciences and
humanities, on the other, in terms of falsifiability and
cumulativeness.

The origins of this trend, that can, briefly, be defined as
"computational social science", go back to the 1960s when the spread
of computers among social scientists paved the way for a school of
thought encompassing a large number of scholars from Herbert Simon and
Thomas Schelling to Joshua Epstein, father of generative social
science.

Nowadays, computational social science represents an integrated and
interdisciplinary way to analyze social phenomena characterized by the
use of advanced computing tools that go beyond the traditional uses of
statistics and mathematics. Enriched by the contribution of different
disciplines, computational social science includes several approaches
and methods:

• Automated information extraction
Algorithmic methods of parsing and coding documents to extract
information from data that can be used, amongst other things, for
designing computational models or performing advanced statistical
analyses.

• Social network analysis
Graph theory applied to social groups and systems.

• Complexity theory
Application of principles, concepts and models of complexity science
to the study of social phenomena.

• Social simulation models
Set of different simulation methods spanning from system dynamics to
cellular automata and agent-based social simulations.

• Geospatial analysis (socio-GIS or social GIS)
Geographic information systems (GIS) allowing the spatially-referenced
analysis of social phenomena.

One of the most interesting features of computational social science
is the move toward an holistic approach in the study of social
phenomena. This may shed a new light on interactions and feedback
between different levels of reality. Social simulations, in
particular, represent an interesting methodology for the analysis of
the relationships that link the micro level (biological bases of human
behavior, individual cognitive dynamics) with the macro level (group
behaviors and cultural, social, economic and institutional dynamics)
of social reality.

The computational approach is already widely developed in some areas:
sociological analysis as well as economics are achieving very
promising results in terms of comprehension, explanation and, in some
cases, prediction of phenomena under investigation. In this scenario,
it is worth reflecting on the intersections between law and the
perspectives opened up by this scientific paradigm, both in terms of
theoretical implications (for the novel contribution that
computational social science can provide in drawing the attention of
legal scholars on the social dimension of legal phenomena), and
operational profiles (to give just one example, the support that
computational social science methods and tools can provide to policy
and decision-making or to the regulatory impact analysis).

This special issue of “Informatica e diritto” aims at bringing
together contributions that, starting from different perspectives
(law, legal informatics, sociology, economics, physics, cognitive
science and computational social science itself, etc.) discuss
research topics in this area at a theoretical level or present
computational social science applications that can be considered
relevant for the legal field. Interdisciplinary insights are also
encouraged.

Authors are invited to submit papers in English, not exceeding 56,000
characters in length, in any of the following formats: MS Word,
Open/Libre Office, LaTeX. Submissions should be sent to the editors
Sebastiano Faro ([log in to unmask]) and Nicola Lettieri
([log in to unmask]) and to the Journal's secretary Simona
Binazzi ([log in to unmask]).


Important Deadlines:

15 December 2011: Submission of title and abstract
31 January 2012: Notification of acceptance
31 March 2012: Submission of full paper
30 April 2012: Notification of peer comments
30 May 2012: Submission of final version