Computational Analysis of Social Processes

Undergraduate / Graduate

How does the human social and cultural world develop and change? The focus of this course is on introducing computational methods for studying the evolution of phenomena over time, alongside relevant theories for interpreting these processes from fields such as History, Anthropology, and Sociology. Students will gain hands-on experience using the Python programming language to harness a diverse set of digital data sources, ranging from satellite images to social media posts. Additionally, they will learn to employ computational approaches, such as simulation and dynamic topic modeling, to study social processes over a variety of different time scales: from the short term (changes in social media network structures over the course of the past week), to longer term (the evolution of English language discourse over the past 100 years), to deep time scales (long-term settlement pattern dynamics over the past 10,000 years).