The course provides an introduction to the basic computational tools, skills, and methods used in Computational Social Science using Python. Python is the most popular programming language for data science, used widely in both academia and the industry. Students will learn to use common workflow and collaboration tools, design, write, and debug simple computer programs, and manage, summarize, and visualize data with common Python libraries. The course will employ interactive tutorials and hands-on exercises using real social data. Participants will work independently and in groups with guidance and support from the lecturers. The practical exercises are designed to demand more autonomy and initiative as the course progresses, culminating in an open-ended group project.

This is an introductory course and no prior experience with programming is required. A basic understanding of statistics and some scripting experience (e.g., from building web pages or statistical analysis programs such as R or Stata) will be helpful but not needed.