Contents
Introduction
Description
Increasingly, social scientists find themselves facing exponentially larger data sets available on the internet and elsewhere without suitable tools to deal with them. Many social scientists end up using spreadsheet programs for their data-processing tasks and spend hours clicking around or copying and pasting, and then repeating the process for other data files. Not only is this a waste of time, but it often leaves you in a situation where it is hard to reproduce the steps that got you a particular result, making your work useless.
This course will show you how to use computing tools freely available via the scripting language Python to use your data more powerfully and effectively. The course touches on many topics of theoretical interest in the emerging field of data science, such as social networks and data visualization, but the focus is on manipulating data so that you can tailor it to the needs of your particular project. The course targets social science students and will assume no prior programming knowledge. Although many of the techniques are relevant to linguistics, economics, and geography, the course focuses on techniques that are applicable to a wide range of data sources, including images, social network data, web pages, blogs.
Tiopics covered include
Practice
The course will use one optional text for introductory material (A Whirlwind tour of Python (Jake VenderPlas). and will also make heavy use of online course notes and freely available Python software. Links to notebooks keyed to both textbooks are provided in the course outline, which will be updated frequently through the course. Please refresh and visit frequently.
Outline
Prerequisites and Grading
No course pre-requisites. No knowledge of programming will be asssumed. Upper division standing. Some openness to acquiring computational skills. Some knowledge of what counts as interesting data in your own Social Science.
Grading will be based on assignments, an extended midterm assignment, and a final project.
Times
Tu 1230-1345
Tu 1400-1515
Wed 1600-1840
Contact Info
Mailing address:
gawron at mail dot sdsu dot edu
Department of Linguistics and Oriental Languages
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-7727
Telephone: (619) 594-0252
Office location: SHW, room 238