Editing Advanced Computational Communication Methods (Summer 2023) (section)

= Course Overview and Learning Objectives =

I teach an [[Intro to Programming and Data Science (Fall 2022)|Intro to Programming and Data Science]] course that gives students an introduction to programming in Python, and some basic skills for gathering and analyzing data from the web.

There are many, many aspects of computational communication research that we don't cover in that class. This class is intended to take the next step in providing resources for students who want to do computational social science research.

That next step typically looks different for different students, depending on what they want to research. One goal of this class is to collect useful resources for learning many of the types of tools and methods that computational social scientists typically use. Some of these will be explicitly discussed in class, but others will not.

In particular, following conversation with group members, we will focus on a fairly deep dive into computational text analysis and reproducible workflows. Other topics will be more self-organized and self-directed.

I will consider this class a complete success if, at the end, every student can:

* Understand in and engage in creating open, reproducible workflows for their academic research
* Understand some of the key tools for doing computational text analysis, including topic models, word embeddings, machine learning classifiers, and LLMs
* Learn how to identify the key texts, software libraries, and resources for learning a new computational method