Computational Methods for the Social Sciences
an introductory course for MSc students in Social Science of the Internet
This course teaches how to collect and wrangle structured and unstructured data from social websites and platforms. In particular, the focus will be on using Python to access data from a diverse variety of sources on the social web (from Twitter to Reddit, from Wikipedia to the front page of the New York Times), and transforming this material into datasets which are amenable to traditional social science analysis. Once the data has been collected, the course familiarizes students with the variety of approaches for processing and preparing data for analysis.