More and more data on communication and other social behavior is becoming digitally available, both because of the surge of inherently digital communication technologies such as Twitter and Facebook and because of digitization of existing materials such as newspaper archives. This flood of data presents a great opportunity for studying communication, but also requires a rich methodological toolkit and a deep awareness of the ways in which technological and methodological possibilities and limitations can influence substantive outcomes. For this reason, we are extremely happy that a new interest group on computational methods will be founded during this ICA meeting. The interest group focuses on the methods of computational social science used in communication research. In particular, computational methods cover computerized tools and algorithms for collecting, processing, analyzing, and visualizing data such as social media data, news sites, and other forms of communication. As such, the group distinguishes from other divisions and interest groups that deal with conceptual issues of social media whereas this group is exclusively oriented to methodological issues. If you are interested in computational methods, consider becoming a member of the interest group and help us elevate this group to a division. You don’t need to be an expert on computational methods to join: part of our mission is to make computational tools more accessible and widely used, so we want to organize tutorials and workshops as well as traditional panels. We believe that computational methods will be at the forefront of progress in the field in the coming decades, and that an ICA division will be a great platform for developing, improving, and sharing the methods and tools we need to move forward.

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