Department of Linguistics and Oriental Languages

Linguistics/BDA 572

Python for Social Scientists

Slides

Description

Increasingly, social scientists find themselves facing exponentially larger data sets available on the internet and elsewhere without suitable tools to deal with them. Many social scientists end up using spreadsheet programs for their data-processing tasks and spend hours clicking around or copying and pasting, and then repeating the process for other data files. Not only is this a waste of time, but it often leaves you in a situation where it is hard to reproduce the steps that got you a particular result, making your work useless.

This course will show you how to use computing tools freely available via the scripting language Python to use your data more powerfully and effectively. The course touches on many topics of theoretical interest in the emerging field of data science, such as social networks and data visualization, but the focus is on manipulating data so that you can tailor it to the needs of your particular project. The course targets social science students and will assume no prior programming knowledge. Although many of the techniques are relevant to linguistics, economics, and geography, the course focuses on techniques that are applicable to a wide range of data sources, including images, social network data, web pages, blogs.

Tiopics covered include

• Python Basics
• Computing with arrays (Numpy)
• Data analsyis with Data frame (Pandas)
• Network analysis (Networkx)
• Elements of text analytics (elementary text extraction, text classification)
• Visualizing similarity relations