COM 597: Community Data Science: Programming and Data Science for Social Media

Course Description:

This course will introduce basic programming and data science tools to give students the skills to find, access, and synthesize data into information. We will cover the basics of the Python programming language, web APIs including APIs from Wikipedia and Twitter, and basic tools for statistical hypothesis testing, data manipulation, and visualization. Students will be encouraged to bring questions and problems from their own area of interest and apply Python and Data Science to those problems through an independent project. Our target audience is students with no previous programming experience. There will be two major additions to the material we teach in the Community Data Science Workshop. First is a capstone independent data research project where students will be expected to practice what they’ve learned by sourcing, cleaning, and analyzing a data set that is relevant to their interests. Second will be special topics from the world of online social media analysis including A/B testing and measuring online success.

Student Testimonial:

“This course was intense and fast-paced, but it was an absolute blast! I took this course because I had taught myself a little bit of HTML, CSS, and C++ before, but I really wanted a more structured environment in which to better learn coding principles. Learning how to code is like learning another language; it takes a lot of practice and effort but you learn a lot of actionable info in a short period of time. From the beginning Professor Guy set the expectation that we weren’t going to become expert Python coders in 10 weeks, but we were going to learn the basic coding logic and syntax, how to pull and manipulate social media data, how to derive meaningful analysis, and how to speak about our technical coding methods in a clear and effective manner. He really made sure the course was as practical and applicable as possible. During the class we had weekly challenge problems where we learned how to manipulate data and then how to access it from website APIs. We got a lot of class time to work together and tackle these problems. These exercises gave us the skills to access and analyze data that we would eventually use for our final project, which we got full autonomy over. We learned basic skills for the first 6 weeks or so, and then had the rest of the classes to work on our final projects and ask Guy questions. He is incredibly enthusiastic and an insanely skilled programmer. This class made me feel that coding was much for accessible and gave me some skills that I could fall back on if I need to do some heavy data analysis in the future. I would highly recommend this course if you are curious about programming and up for a little bit of a fun challenge!”