Social scientists are increasingly working with big and complex datasets that contain spatial, group-level, and individual-level dimensions to answer questions about society. In this course, students will develop introductory programming knowledge and data acumen in order to create and run computer programs to explore where, when, and why social processes occur, drawing on theories from geography, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. Instruction will focus on applying current data analysis libraries, communicating and translating data science methods to both researchers and the public, distinguishing causation from correlation and coincidence, and negotiating tradeoffs between different computational and statistical approaches.
Social scientists are increasingly working with big and complex datasets that contain spatial, group-level, and individual-level dimensions to answer questions about society. In this course, students will develop introductory programming knowledge and data acumen in order to create and run computer programs to explore where, when, and why social processes occur, drawing on theories from geography, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. Instruction will focus on applying current data analysis libraries, communicating and translating data science methods to both researchers and the public, distinguishing causation from correlation and coincidence, and negotiating tradeoffs between different computational and statistical approaches.
