Aim and approach

This course provides a strong methodology foundation in applying data science methods for social sciences. In the end of the course, the student knows how to (a) conceptually apply data science approaches in work and (b) knows how to code machine learning using R or Python language.

This course focuses on

• conceptual understanding of applying data science approaches through discussing papers which have used a particular approach.
• hands-on skills of conducting these analysis with data sets

By the end of the course, students can

• conduct data pre-processing both with quantitative and qualitative datasets
• apply unsupervised machine learning methods to quantitative and qualitative data and draw social science relevant conclusions from the results
• apply supervised machine learning methods to quantitative and qualitative data and draw social science relevant conclusions from the results
• discuss the benefits and challenges of using data science methods for social science research methods and skills to apply these methods in students’ own research domain.

If you have quiestions about the course, please contact us via grp-dcm-teaching@helsinki.fi .

Prerequisite

Before the first class, student should master bascis or Python or R and know how to

• working with variables, for-loops and if-structures
• opening files and writing files
• calling functions or methods

Course materials

• Chapter "Algorithmic Data Analysis" from Coding Social Science. Understanding and Doing Computational Social Science and prepeare by going through the exercises.
• In class coding activities

Suggested additional reading

• Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., & Friedman, J. The Elements of Statistical Learning. Elements. New York, NY: Springer New York.

Course evaluation

Course is evaluated as pass/fail. To pass, you need 125 points. Each student choose what learning activities they want to engage tio help them in their learning process and combine different approaches and modules.

• Attending class discussion: 5 points per each class
• Writing an response to data science article of your choice discussing its methodological choices: 5 points per each response
• Doing the class activity and writing a reflection diary based on it: 10 points per each activity
• Taking a paper of your choice which is not using data science methods and introduce how you would use data science approaches to redo that paper: 10 points per paper
• Taking a paper of your choice which is not using data science methods and do write a replication study which used data science methods: 25 points per paper
• Writing an empirical article (with introduction, theory, methods etc.) which utilises two methods discussed in the class: 80 points per article
• Writing an empirical article (with introduction, theory, methods etc.) which utilises one method discussed in the class: 60 points per article
• Writing a brief analysis of a research problem of your choice with these methods: 15 points per article
• Propose your own activity here

(Please note that point scales migth still change before the first class.)

Syllabus

17.1. Introduction and Social science research questions and data science

• Bartlett, A., Lewis, J., Reyes-Galindo, L., & Stephens, N. (2018). The locus of legitimate interpretation in Big Data sciences: Lessons for computational social science from -omic biology and high-energy physics. Big Data & Society, 5(1)
• Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297.
• Hindman, M. (2015). Building Better Models: Prediction, Replication, and Machine Learning in the Social Sciences. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 659(1), 48–62.

23.1. Manual rules as data science and Working with Textual Data

• Munger, K. (2017). Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: Experimentally Reducing Racist Harassment. Political Behavior, 39(3), 629–649.
• King, G., Lam, P., & Roberts, M. E. (2017). Computer-Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text. American Journal of Political Science, 61(4), 971–988.
• Hoffman, E. R., McDonald, D. W., & Zachry, M. (2017). Evaluating a Computational Approach to Labeling Politeness. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW), 1–14.

31.1. K-means and cluster analysis

• Nelimarkka, M., & Hellas, A. (2018). Social Help-seeking Strategies in a Programming MOOC. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE ’18 (pp. 116–121). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
• Burscher, B., Vliegenthart, R., & Vreese, C. H. de. (2016). Frames Beyond Words. Social Science Computer Review, 34(5), 530–545.
• k-means

7.2. Topic models

• Pöyhtäri, R., Nelimarkka, M., Nikunen, K., Ojala, M., Pantti, M., & Pääkkönen, J. (2019). Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment. International Communication Gazette.
• Pantti, M., Nelimarkka, M., Nikunen, K., & Titley, G. (2019). The meanings of racism: Public discourses about racism in Finnish news media and online discussion forums. European Journal of Communication, 34(5), 503–519.
• LDA

14.2. Support vector machines and Naive Bayes

• Weber, I., Ukkonen, A., & Gionis, A. (2012). Answers, not links. In Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining - WSDM ’12 (pp. 613–622). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
• Yu, B., Kaufmann, S., & Diermeier, D. (2008). Classifying Party Affiliation from Political Speech. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 5(1), 33–48.
• Support Vector Machines
• Naive Bayes

21.2. Decision trees and random forests

• Zhang, A. X., & Counts, S. (2015). Modeling Ideology and Predicting Policy Change with Social Media. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’15 (pp. 2603–2612). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
• Compton: A Data-driven Approach to the Fragile Families Challenge: Prediction through Principal-Components Analysis and Random Forests
• Decision trees

28.2. Association rules and Future Outlook

• Jurek, S. J., & Scime, A. (2014). Achieving Democratic Leadership: A Data-Mined Prescription. Social Science Quarterly, 95(1), 97–110.
• Association rules
• Breiman, L. (2001). Statistical modeling: The two cultures. Statistical Science, 16(3), 199–215.
• Radford, J., & Joseph, K. (2020). Theory In, Theory Out: The uses of social theory in machine learning for social science, 1–19. Note, this is not a published paper yet.