1 Week 1: Intro. to CSS
This week will be dedicated to a more general introduction to computational social science and what it means to think “computationally.”
1.1 Computational data
In essence, this means getting used to different types of data. These might be:
- Social media data;
- Image data;
- Sound data;
- Video data;
- Remote sensing data;
- Call detail records
These data are “found” or “trace” data. They are not custom-made for social science; they can be repurposed, though, for answering questions in the social sciences.
1.2 Computational thinking
We’ll also be be talking about what it means to “think computationally.” In her article Jeanette Wing describes computational thinking as a “universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.” But what is computational thinking?
In summary, it asks:
- what is computable?;
- it states the difficulty of a problem in computational terms;
- it asks whether an approximate solution is good enough;
- and it requires imagination to abstract into an approximate solution;
- to problems that might apply across almost every academic discipline imaginable
We’ll discuss a concrete example of this in our lecture.
1.3 Essential reading:
1.4 Slides
Slides for week one are available here