The Research Center for Educational and Network Studies (RECENS) was founded by the initiative of Károly Takács as a research center of the Institute of Sociology and Social Policy at Corvinus University of Budapest in January 2010.  One of the major aims of the RECENS was to evolve into an outstanding scientific community of social network analysis in Hungary, a community that actively participates in Hungarian and international academic life. This research collaboration was the basis for the LENDÜLET grant proposal, which was won by the research team led by Károly Takács. It was the first LENDÜLET research group to receive funding in the social sciences discipline. The project started in September 2012 and received an outstanding evaluation from anonymous academic referees in 2015. Thanks to this evaluation, the research group has been tenured, and it became a former part of the Centre for Social Science as a standalone research center.

 

The subsequent major success for the RECENS research group was winning an ERC consolidator grant by Károly Takács in 2014. The title of the proposal was: No Sword Bites So Fiercly as an Evil Tongue? Gossip Wrecks Reputation, but Enhances Cooperation [EVILTONGUE]. The project started on 1’st of December, 2015. The ERC project has achieved a breakthrough in the statistical methodology of analyzing three-way (sender, receiver, and target) relational event gossip data. Thanks to their technological innovation, the project collected spontaneous conversation data. As a result, the team accumulated solid quantitative evidence that gossip is an essential part of informal conversations, which claim has previously been made based purely on anthropological accounts. 

 

Until 2018, no Computational Social Science research group existed in the Centre for Social Sciences. The former director of the Centre (Tamás Rudas) supported the more active presence of CSS research within the research network. As the RECENS research team members had previously covered areas of CSS research (e.g., Network, digital data), the research team became the focal point for CSS research within the centre. This has meant an extension of previous research directions and the addition of new colleagues to the unit. The unit's name has been changed to Computational Social Science - Research Center for Educational and Network Studies (CSS-RECENS) to reflect these changes starting 1st October 2018. 

 

From a methodological point of view, the research group's research covers two broad areas: network research and digital data-driven research. These two areas are not entirely separate, with overlaps at both the research and project levels.