Computational Social Science: Tools to Collect & Analyze Human Behavior Using Data from the…

Catalog description

This course explores the inter-disciplinary field of computational social science, drawing from sociology, computer science, and related disciplines. Students will obtain skills to automate collection of social science data from new sources (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.), to classify unstructured data into discrete variables and to analyze them using a combination of techniques that includes screen-scraping, natural language processing and machine learning. Complex ethical and legal issues that arise when working with these novel sources of data. Students develop their imagination about new questions that can be asked with these new data sources. Reading and reproducing exemplary studies produced by computational social scientists. 001811