Computing for the Social Sciences

This is an applied course for social scientists with little-to-no programming experience who wish to harness growing digital and computational resources. The focus of the course is on generating reproducible research through the use of programming languages and version control software. Major emphasis is placed on a pragmatic understanding of core principles of programming and packaged implementations of methods. Students will leave the course with basic computational skills implemented through many computational methods and approaches to social science; while students will not become expert programmers, they will gain the knowledge of how to adapt and expand these skills as they are presented with new questions, methods, and data.

I originally developed the course in 2016 at the University of Chicago and have taught hundreds of students over more than a dozen iterations of the class. All course materials, including lecture notes, slides, and in-class exercises, are published under open-source license.