AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

Academic year
2022/2023 Syllabus of previous years
Official course title
AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
Course code
FM0505 (AF:378374 AR:208428)
Modality
On campus classes
ECTS credits
6
Degree level
Master's Degree Programme (DM270)
Educational sector code
SECS-P/08
Period
4th Term
Course year
1
Where
VENEZIA
Moodle
Go to Moodle page
The course aims at introducing students to the application of computational tools to explore significant social phenomena.
At the same time, it will illustrate applications of the blooming field of computational social science to humanities fields such as history, literary analysis, and the history of science.
Lectures will be interactive and will require students to develop in the classroom simple computational examples in Python.
The course aims at developing skills that students can use in research but also in different innovative professional fields, such as web analytics and online consumer analysis.
The course presupposes that students have learned some basic coding tools and have acquired basic notions and tools of computational linguistics.
Part 1. Computational social science for the humanities, with applications to history and literature

- What is computational social science?
- Detecting historical trends through language big data
- Simple computational models of social phenomena. (Examples: Contagion, discrimination, conflict, and conventions).
- Social network theory, with applications to literature and history


Part 2. Machine learning
- A gentle intorduction to machine learning
- Using scikit-learn
- Applications of machine learning: classification

During the course, reading materials will be distributed by the teacher, together with teaching colab code notebooks.
The final evaluation will be based on individual projectwork during the course (1/3 of the evaluation) and on a written final exam (2/3 of the evaluation)
The course will combine frontal teaching, individual and group projectwork by students and interactive coding applications during lectures.
English
written
Definitive programme.
Last update of the programme: 14/07/2022