Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)

Welcome to the page for the Fall 2014 Community Data Science Workshops (CDSW) — a series of four sessions designed to introduce some of the basic tools of programming and analysis of data from online communities to absolute beginners.

The CDSW will be held on the evening of Friday November 7 and all day on Saturdays 8th, 15th, and 22nd at the University of Washington, Seattle. This pages includes links to the curriculum we we will use. We ran these sessions once before in in Spring 2014. Although we are updating the curriculum, you can see details of what we did last time on the archived version of the website for the previous workshop.

Registration

Unfortunately, registration is over and we were oversubscribed and have a large waitlist. Sorry about that! This is our second workshop and we do hope to run more of these again in the future.

Interested in being a mentor? We are still intersted in mentors, however. If you already have experience with Python, please consider helping out at the sessions as a mentor. Being a mentor will involve working with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is required. And we’ll feed you! Because we want to keep a very high mentor to student ratio, recruiting more mentors means we can accept more participants. If you’re interested, email makohill@uw.edu. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Schedule

All sessions are interactive and involve you programming on your own and on your own laptop. Everybody attending should bring a laptop and a power cord so that they don't run out of battery.

Session 0 (Friday November 7th Evening 6:30-9:30pm)

Come to Communications (CMU) 104 between 6:30 and 9:30pm. It's OK if you come a little late but you'll want to have as much time as you can to finish the setup and self-directed assignments so come as close to 6:30pm as you can. Most people will finish early but some people will definitely need the full 3 hours. It's hard to know in advance where problems will crop up so please come on time even if you are confident.

During this session, mentors will help you:

• set up your development environment
• learn how to execute Python code from a file and interactively from a Python prompt
• learn about printing and using Python as a calculator

>>Click here for the the setup and tutorial material.<<

Session 1 (Saturday November 8th)

Come to Savery Hall (SAV) 260 by 9:45am (Note: it's not in the communication building). You will need time to get settled and setup. We want to start lecturing promptly at 10am.

• Morning, 10am-12:20 (SAV 260): A 2 hour lecture-based introduction to the Python programming language
• Lunch, 12:20-1pm (pizza in Room 126): We'll provide lunch
• Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm (Room 104, 126, 120, 242): Python practice through short projects on a variety of fun and practical topics
• Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Session 2 (Saturday November 15th)

Come to Savery Hall (SAV) 260 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We want to start lecturing promptly at 10am.

Please come prepared to start working in your Python interpreter during the lesson. If you are going to be bringing a different computer than the one you brought and setup last time, you will need to go through the setup section of the setup and tutorial session from the first Friday session. You don't need to do the tutorial or CodeAcademy lessons again unless you think that you could use a refresher. You can also skip the sections about installing Baby Names and Wordplay. We won't be looking at those in this session.

To participate in the Twitter afternoon session, you must have registered with Twitter as a developer before the session by following the Twitter authentication setup instructions. If you did not do this, or if you tried but did not succeed, please attend one of the other two sessions instead.

• Morning, 10am-12:20: (SAV 260) A 2 hour lecture-based introduction to the web APIs
• Lunch, 12:20-1pm: (CMU 126) We'll provide lunch in the form of vegetarian Indian food.
• Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm: (CMU 104, 120, 126, 242) Python and API practice through short projects
• Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Session 3 (Saturday November 22nd)

Come to Savery Hall (SAV) 260 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We want to start lecturing promptly at 10am.

Please come prepared to start working in your Python interpreter during the lesson. If you are going to be bringing a different computer than the one you brough and setup last time, you will need to go through the setup section of the setup and tutorial session from the first Friday session. You don't need to do the tutorial or CodeAcademy lessons again unless you think that you could use a refresher. You can also skip the sections about installing Baby Names and Wordplay. We won't be looking at those in this session.

In the lecture, we're going to be doing building some simple visualizations online in Google Docs. Please make sure you have a Google Account you can use for the session and poke around at and create a new Google Spreadsheet. I suspect that most of you are going to use Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, Gnumeric, etc., in your work after the class but using Google Docs means that we'll all be using the same software during the lecture.

• Morning, 10am-12:20: A 2 hour lecture-based introduction to data analysis
• Lunch, 12:20-1pm: We'll provide lunch! This week it will be vegetarian Greek food including veggie dolmathes, hummus and pita, greek salad, vegetarian souvlakei, rice, and oven baked potatoes with olive oil, garlic, and oregano.
• Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm: Python and analysis practice through short projects
• Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Resources

• Friday November 7th setup and tutorial
• Saturday November 8th lecture
• Saturday November 8th projects
• Introduction to Python CodeAcademy exercises
• Saturday November 15th lecture
• Saturday November 15th projects
• Introduction to APIs in Python CodeAcademy exercises - Includes information on using APIs from NPR, Bitly, Sunlight Foundation, and PlaceKitten
• Saturday November 22nd lecture
• Saturday November 22nd projects

Venue and Logistics

Contact information

If you have any questions about the event, you can contact makohill@uw.edu.

Location

The University of Washington Department of Communication is hosting the event and all of our events except the Saturday morning lectures will be held in the Communications building (CMU) on the Seattle UW campus. This includes the Friday setup and the and all of the afternoon projects. You can find the building on this Google map or on this campus map from UW.

Because we have grown so big, we have had to move the lectures into a larger lecture hall than the CMU building has available. Please meet at Savery Hall 260 (map) on the three Saturday mornings at 9:45. It is about a five minute walk from the Communications building. Unfortunately, most of the doors to Savery Hall are locked on weekends. The door on the west side of the building (i.e., the one nearest Kane Hall) should be open.

Parking at UW is available but is not free. There is self-serve parking as well as gatehouses that are staffed from 7am on Saturday and can issue you parking passes and point you to an appropriate lot. More details are on the UW Commuter Services website for Visitors and Guests. UW is also well served by public transportation and easily accessible by bicycle with the Burke Giilman Trail.

One important note is that Huskies football games will be played at UW on Saturday November 8th and 22nd. The November 8th game will start at 4pm and the time for the November 22nd game has not been set. Parking may be more complicated and it might be worth considering taking public transit.

What to bring

1. a laptop
   • for Session 0 make sure that you have about 1GB of space free so you can install Python and all the necessary other software
   • for Sessions 1-3 bring your laptop with Python set up
2. a power cord
3. a sense of adventure!

Food

Thanks to generous sponsorship by the eScience Institute at UW, we will provide catered lunchs during the Saturday sessions. Although we haven't figured out the menu, we will make sure to have plenty of vegetarian and vegan options. If the food we have doesn't doesn't work for you, there is a food court open for lunch in the HUB (the UW student center) that is almost directly next door.

Social Media

• We use the hashtag #cdsw

Thanks!

This event would be possible without all the volunteer mentors, the advice and direction of Open Hatch and support of the UW Department of Communication and UW eScience Institute.