Before week 1. Take a look at this page before you do anything. This class most likely works a little bit differently from other classes you’ve taken. The notebook explains pretty much everything - the rest will be explained during the lectures. In case the link doesn’t work, you can also see the file here on Github, but the videos won’t display properly

Admin. A summary of the tools that we will use in this class. Very important to go through this too!

Week 1: Intro to Computational Social Science. This week is all about getting started: learning about how the course works, make sure you master the tools you need to follow the class. I will give you an introduction to the field of Computational Social Science. And, we will start with something hands-on: you will learn about web-scraping and start gathering some data from the web.

• Reading: Bit by Bit, chapter 1 Start by reading the Introduction of the book, where you will get you an understanding of the history of the field and the general framework.

• Reading: Bit by Bit, chapter 6 Read the Ethics chapter of the book. Here, I don’t expect you to read all the details. However, I want to make sure you get an overall understanding of the ethical challenges and some of the approaches that are used in the field to deal with these complex issues. You can focus on sections 6.4 and 6.6.

Week 2: Data 1 - Gathering data This week we will learn more about data sources for Computational Social Science. First you will learn about different data types through some lectures and reading. Then, we will move on to do something practical: you will learn about APIs to collect data and use them to gather data on Computational Social Scientists.

• Reading: Bit by Bit, sections 2.1 to 2.3 Read sections 2.1 to 2.3. The idea is for you to understand, in general terms, advantages and challenges of large observational datasets (a.k.a. Big Data) for social studies.

Week 3: Data 2 - Gathering Data Part 2 + Data Viz This week is divided in two parts. First, we will finalize the data collection and generate the final dataset that we will use for the rest of the course. Then, we will talk about how to effectively use data visualization techniques as a tool to analyse empirical data. We will focus on visualizing highly heterogeneous data, with values that spans several orders of magnitude and include many extreme values.

• Reading: There is no reading this week.

Week 4: Introduction to Network Science This week, we get started with Networks. First, we talk about the History of Networks and the basic network formalism and notation. Next, we will create, analyse, and visualize the Network of Computational Social Scientists.

• Reading: Chapters 1 and 2 of the Network Science book
• Assignment: Assignment 1

Week 5: Networks II - Properties of Real World Networks More on networks! First some talking by me, where you will learn about heavy tailed distributions and the properties of real-world social networks. Then, you will use the NetworkX library to visualise and investigate the properties of the Computational Social Scientists Network. You will study properties of this network and compare it to a random network model.

• Reading: Chapter 3 of the Network Science book. The most important sections are 3.1 to 3.4 and 3.8 to 3.10, so focus on that.

Week 6: Networks III - Centrality and Communities Today we will study the network of Computational Social Scientists more in depth. We will learn about more advanced network science concepts (centrality, assortativity, communities), then put things into practice to study the network of Computational Social Scientists.

• Reading: Chapter 7 of the Network Science book(the most important sections are 7.1 to 7.3); Chapter 9 of the Network Science book (you can skip 9.3, 9.5 and 9.7).

Week 7: Text 1 - The Basics . We’re changing gears. We’ve looked at the network of Computational Social Scientists. Now we’ll put together the tools for working with the text. We will learn the basics, then get real and work with the text from the papers’ abstracts.

• Reading I: Chapter 1 (sections 1.1 to 1.3) of the Natural Language Processing with Python (NLPP) book.
• Reading II: Chapter 3 (sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.9, and 3.10. ) of the Natural Language Processing with Python (NLPP) book It’s not important that you go in depth with everything here - the key think is that you know that Chapter 3 of this book exists, and that it’s a great place to return to if you’re ever in need of an explanation of regular expressions, unicode, etc.
• Reading III: Skim through the Wikipedia page on the Zipf’s law

Week 8: Text 2 - Networks and Text . Today we will talk a bit more about basic techinques to explore textual data and will apply to study the abstract dataset. It is a pretty light class, so you have time to focus on the assignment.