SOSC 314: Computational Social Science: Tools to Collect & Analyze Human Behavior
Undergraduate class, Duke Kunshan University, 2024
Class description:
This course explores the interdisciplinary field of computational social science, drawing from sociology, political science, computer science, and related disciplines. You will obtain skills to automate the collection of social science data from new sources (i.e., text-as-data), to classify unstructured data into discrete variables, and to analyze them using a combination of techniques that includes natural language processing and machine learning approaches. Complex ethical and legal issues arise when working with these novel sources of data (e.g., privacy and security concerns, possibility of server overload, etc). You will be able to develop your imagination about new questions that can be asked with these new data sources. We will also read and discuss exemplary studies produced by computational social scientists.