CSS: Data Science for Social Scientists
Faculty are invited to participate in a two-week workshop this May:
Data Science for Social Scientists
While many social scientists use quantitative data, the increasing volume of digitized and “born digital” collections of books, articles, documents, and social media present tremendous new opportunities for research. But for those with little training in computer science, the barriers to entry can seem daunting.
Columbia’s Working Group on Computational Social Science is therefore offering a new workshop to offer a very practical introduction to computer packages accessible to researchers with varying skill sets. Participants will learn how to organize and analyze textual data, get an overview of advances in natural language processing and machine learning, see how they can grapple with old research problems with new rigor, and take on entirely new kinds of questions.
About the Workshop: This is a joint initiative of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and the Data Science Institute. The sessions will be held from 9:00-1:00 pm, May 22, 2018 – June 2, 2018, except Memorial Day (May 29.) The outline of the curriculum appears below.
Eligibility: Priority will be given to Columbia faculty and research scholars from the social sciences and SIPA. Others will be eligible to participate on a space available basis.
How to Apply: Please contact Ray Hicks rh2883@columbia.edu by January 31, 2018, and let us know about what you are most interested in learning. If you would like to participate but the timing poses a problem, tell us which dates and times you can commit to attending.
Content:
Day 1: What is Digital Text?
Day 2: Bringing text into software
Day 3: Getting around the data
Day 4: Quantifying textual data
Day 5: Statistical introduction
Day 6: Graphs and tables
Day 7: Measures of association
Day 8: Descriptive text
Day 9: Regression and logit analysis