Thinking with Deep Learning for Complex Social & Cultural Data Analysis

Undergraduate / Graduate

A deluge of digital content is generated daily by web-based platforms and sensors that capture digital traces of human communication and connection, and complex states of society, culture, economy, and the world. Emerging deep learning methods enable the integration of these complex data into unified social and cultural "spaces" that enable new answers to classic social and cultural questions, and also pose novel questions. From the perspective of deep learning, everything can be viewed as data-novels, field notes, photographs, lists of transactions, networks of interaction, theories, epistemic styles-and our treatment examines how to configure deep learning architectures and multi-modal data pipelines to improve the capacity of representations, the accuracy of complex predictions, and the relevance of insights to substantial social and cultural questions. This class is for anyone wishing to analyse textual, network, image or arbitrary structured and unstructured data, especially in concert with one another to solve complex social and cultural analysis problems (e.g., characterize a culture; predict next year's ideology).