jiamim / gt-css-class

Georgia Tech graduate seminar on computational social science

Georgia Tech CS 8803-CSS: Computational Social Science

Time and place: 3:00-4:15 PM on Monday and Wednesday, in CCB 52. Office hours are Wednesday 4:15-5:15 PM in CCB 316.

• Schedule
• Grading criteria
• You can request overload registration by filling out this form.

Goals

The principle aim for this graduate seminar is to develop a broad understanding of the emerging cross-disciplinary field of Computational Social Science. This includes:

• Quantitative analysis of social phenomena
• Models of network structure
• Methods for text analysis
• Applications to social science fields, such as political science, sociolinguistics, sociology, and economics

Additional learning objectives include:

• Reading and understanding contemporary research papers
• Presenting concise and informative summaries of published research
• Executing computational social science research, through labs and a replication project

Readings

Monday readings will be about computational methods. They will largely be drawn from the following textbooks, all of which are available online:

• An Introduction to Statistical Learning by James, Witten, Hastie, and Tibshirani
• An Introduction to Natural Language Processing by Eisenstein
• Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Sagalnik
• Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg

Wednesday readings will usually be research papers, mostly from the social sciences. These readings will be presented by teams of 2-3 students. We will also spend half of (most) wednesdays on in-class labs.