Computational Social Science

Course Description

This research training introduces a range of computational data analysis methods. Using R and occasionally Python, students learn to write scripts for analyzing text-as-data and other data types. The course covers both supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques for classification, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis.

This research training was originally taught at Goethe University Frankfurt but is now openly accessible to anyone. Most sessions combine lectures with hands-on tutorials.

Sessions

Session	Topic	Slides	Tutorials	Data	Solutions	Software & Packages	Further Reading
1	Introduction	Slides	R basics	Your Survey	Solution	R & RStudio	Hofman et al. (2021)
2	Text-As-Data: Preparation	Slides	Preprocessing Text-as-Data	Paper	Solution	quanteda	Denny & Spirling (2018)
3	Text-As-Data: Description	Slides	Describing Text-as-Data	Paper (prepared)	Solution	quanteda	Van Atteveldt et al. (2022): Chapter 10
4	Sentiment Analysis	Slides	Sentiment Analysis	Large Movie Review Dataset v1.0	Solution	tidytext	van Atteveldt et al. (2021)
5	Machine Learning	Slides	Supervised Machine Learning	Survey from Trilling (2013)	Solution	tidymodels	Van Atteveldt et al. (2022): Chapter 08
6	Machine Learning with Text-as-Data	Slides	Machine Learning with Text-as-Data	Large Movie Review Dataset v1.0	Solution	quanteda.textmodels	Van Atteveldt et al. (2022): Chapter 11
7	Topic Modeling	Slides	Structural Topic Models	AG News Classification Dataset	Solution	stm	Roberts et al. (2014)
8	Advanced Topic Modeling	Slides	Keyword Assisted Topic Models	AG News Classification Dataset	Solution	keyatm	Eshima et al. (2023)
9	Web scraping	Slides	Scraping Websites	Wikipedia & IC2S2	Solution	rvest	Freelon (2018)
10	Data Collection	Slides	Nexis Data	Nexis Uni	Solution	LexisNexisTools	Schafraad et al. (2006)
11	Open Science	Slides	Working with GitHub			GitHub	Trisovic et al. (2022)
12	Cloud Computing	Slides	BERTopic in Google Colab	AG News Classification Dataset		Google Colab
13	Course Wrap-Up	Slides					van Atteveldt et al. (2022)