Thinking like a Computational Social Scientist

Undergraduate / Graduate

The movement of much of our social lives online has created exciting new opportunities for social science research. This course provides a broad survey of computational methods used to make sense of this data. Students will learn how to collect online data and analyze this data using contemporary techniques from natural language processing, supervised/unsupervised machine learning, and generative AI. Students will also cultivate analytical skills through formal paper presentations, oral exams, and an original research project. The course will be taught in Python. This is an intuitive introduction without prerequisites, although previous experience with probability, statistics, and/or programming will be helpful. This course has a shared lecture on Thursdays and a separate graduate and undergraduate sections on Tuesdays(required).