Computational Methods for Social Scientists

This course will teach students the fundamentals of computational methods for social science research, with an emphasis on techniques for analyzing large-scale textual data. The first part of the course will provide students with basic technical skills necessary to conduct computational research, including introducing them to Python programming and web-scraping. The second part of the course will focus on automated text analysis, highlighting key methods appropriate for inductive or deductive inquiry, such as topic modeling and dictionary-based methods. The course assumes no previous knowledge of programming and is most appropriate for graduate students in the social sciences or humanities.