PS 1702 - CODING AND COMPUTATION SOCIAL SCIENCE
Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
From the hacking of elections and the spread of disinformation to algorithms that have been used to organize protests as well as for brutal repression, the era of “big data”, “analytics”, and “data science” has ushered in new computational tools and digital realities that are changing societies, economies and political relations. This class is meant to be a gentle introduction to the emerging field of computational social science, where we study the opportunities and challenges with both collecting and exploring digitally available political and social information such as text, geo-locations and social media connections to better understand human decisions and interactions. We begin by going back to basics, exploring the reasons and ways individuals and policy-makers use and misuse data. We then turn our focus to flexible computational tools for data collection and visualization and how they can provide unique help in answering important questions such as what causes war and violence, who represses human rights, and what parties are likely to win elections. By the end of the class, students will be exposed not only to coding and computer languages that are often used in data analytics in industry, government and academia, including bash, Python and R, but how these languages can be used to better understand the changing digital world that surrounds us.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Click here for class schedule information.
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