Welcome to COM 682!

Introductions

Dad Joke

  • Why did the nearsighted man fall in the well?
  • He couldn’t see that well!

The Class

I have a few main goals for the class

  1. Provide a helpful, constructive, motivating space for you to work on learning and applying computational methods.
  2. Create a set of curated resources to share with each other and the world.
  3. Teach some best practices for doing computational work.
  4. Think about new ways to apply computational methods to social science problems.

How we get there

Structure

  • First weekly meetings
    • Reproducible workflows + computational text analysis
  • Later weekly meetings
    • 2 topic presentations
    • 2 work-in-progress presentations

Tools

  • Wiki
  • Element
  • Brightspace

Wiki

  • Schedule
  • Links to readings
  • Curated list of resources
    • Possibly better to put this on Github? Maybe after the class?

Element / Matrix

  • Communciation
    • Class sessions
    • Announcements
    • Coordination
    • Discussion
    • Help
  • Download the apps!

Brightspace

  • Turning in assignments

Assignments

  • Topic Exploration
  • Final Project

Topic Exploration

  • Curate a set of resources explaining the topic
  • Ideally:
    • Academic paper
    • Explainer video / tutorial
    • Useful Python librar(y|ies)
    • Additional resources
  • Post on the wiki (see my examples)

Presentations

  • Topic presentations (~10 mins)
    • Walk us through what you found, tell us how to navigate resources
  • WIP presentation
    • Present on where you’re at with your project
    • Provide a document by Friday before presenting
      • Tell us where to focus, what feedback would be helpful

Final Project - Paper option

  • Advance a project you are working on using what you learn in this class
  • Default option
    • Jupyter notebook
    • Short intro + Methods + Result section of paper
  • Do what is best for your future goals

Final Project - Explainer option

  • Take your topic exploration and make it amazing.
  • Create resources to help others understand the topic and/or how to apply the method
    • TikTok videos
    • Blog posts
    • Jupyter notebooks
    • Etc.

Grades

  • Goal is learning
  • Two self-assessment reflections

Conversation

  • What should we change to help you meet your goals?
  • What computational text analysis topics are missing?

TODOs

  • Learn how to edit the wiki
  • Sign up for a topic (including text analysis)
  • Sign up for two presentation days - one topic, one WIP