Computational Methods Using Online Social Media Data

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course will discuss a broad range of computational social science topics that leverage large-scale data from online communication platforms to gain insights into social issues. We will start from collecting and processing data from social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, IMDB, Airbnb, Yelp), and then introduce computational research topics that include but are not limited to: sentiment analysis, deceptive marketing, recommendation system, fake news detection, spam detection, bot detection, demographic inference, public health, political attitude analysis, personality and behavior analysis, and cyberbullying. We will use version control techniques (e.g., git, Github) to keep track of the class projects. The ultimate goal of this course is to provide a broad introduction of computational social science research areas and train students to be familiar with the pipelines of doing computational research.