Teaching

COM 411: Communication and Social Networks

Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2021

I taught our Communication and Social Networks course. I have continued to evolve how I teach the R component. I have started teaching ggraph and tidygraph. I think it’s a little bit more accessible than igraph, and also introduces tidyverse syntax. I also re-organized the course so that one day a week is more theoretical and one day is more technical/lab-based.

COM 674: Introduction to Programming and Data Science

Graduate course, Purdue University, 2021

I continued to teach my intro to programming course for graduate students, in both Summer 2021 and Fall 2021. The course introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. We go over programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, and basic statistical tests.

COM 495: Turning Data into Insight and Stories

Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2020

I developed a course designed to teach both the technical skills to explore and extract insight from data and the communication skills to visualize, present, and discuss data insights. The course focused most on learning R, and particularly creating compelling visualizations in R, rather than statistical procedures. The syllabus is available here. For the visualization aspects, I drew heavily on Andrew Heiss’s course on Data Visualization in R.

COM 411: Communication and Social Networks

Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2020

I taught our Communication and Social Networks course. I have continued to evolve how I teach the R component. I have started teaching ggraph and tidygraph. I think it’s a little bit more accessible than igraph, and also introduces tidyverse syntax. I also re-organized the course so that one day a week is more theoretical and one day is more technical/lab-based. This class was all online, but we made it work! :)

COM 674: Introduction to Programming and Data Science

Graduate course, Purdue University, 2020

I built heavily on Tommy Guy’s course run at the University of Washington to develop a course that introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. The course includes programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, and basic statistical tests. The course was taught during both Spring 2020 and an intense four-week summer course