Interdisciplinary field of computational social science, drawing from sociology, computer science, and related disciplines. Obtain skills to automate collection of social science data from new sources (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.), classify unstructured data into discrete variables, analyze them using a combination of techniques that includes screen-scraping, natural language processing and machine learning. Complex ethical and legal issues that arise when working with these novel sources of data. Students develop their imagination about new questions that can be asked with these new data sources. Reading and reproducing exemplary studies produced by computational social scientists.
Department of Sociology