Computing for the Social Sciences

Undergraduate / Graduate

This is an applied course for social scientists with little-to-no programming experience who wish to harness growing digital and computational resources. The focus is on learning the basics of programming in R and generating reproducible research. Topics include coding concepts (e.g., data structures, control structures. etc.), data visualization, data wrangling, web-scraping, version control software, exploratory data analysis, and more. Students will leave the course with basic programming skills for the social sciences and the ability to adapt and expand these skills as they encounter new questions, methods, and data beyond the course. Requirements: No prior experience with R is required, though it's helpful to have completed a course involving a programming language (e.g., Python, Stata, SPSS, or others) in some capacity. If you're unsure or have had informal exposure to programming, please email the instructor to see if the course is a good fit.