AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

The course aims at introducing students to the application of computational tools to explore significant social phenomena.
At the same time, it will illustrate applications of the blooming field of computational social science to humanities fields such as history, literary analysis, and the history of science.
Lectures will be interactive and will require students to develop in the classroom simple computational examples in Python.

The course aims at developing skills that students can use in research but also in different innovative professional fields, such as web analytics and online consumer analysis.

The course presupposes that students have learned some basic coding tools and have acquired basic notions and tools of computational linguistics.

Part 1. Computational social science for the humanities, with applications to history and literature (8 lectures)

- What is computational social science?
- Simple computational models of social phenomena. (Examples: Contagion, discrimination, conflict, and conventions).
- Social network theory, with applications to literature and history
- Detecting historical trends through language data

Part 2. The social life of language. Exploring language and its users in the web (7 lectures)
- Why studying social phenomena on the web?
- How to acquire data from social media
- Basic sentiment and emotion analysis of web data
- Tools for studying opinion dynamics in the web

During the course, reading materials will be distributed by the teacher, together with teaching colab code notebooks.

The final evaluation will be based on individual projectwork during the course (1/3 of the evaluation) and on a written final exam (2/3 of the evaluation)

The course will combine frontal teaching, individual and group projectwork by students and interactive coding applications during lectures.

English

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development