Welcome to CSS 1¶
This course develops computational thinking practices and skills critical for defining, describing and analyzing social science problems using a computational approach. Students will learn to program in Python in the context of computational social science problems.
Computational Social Science is the use of computation to study social phenomena. This enterprise has two facets:
generating and analyzing large datasets of human behavior, and
simulating or optimizing models to understand their implications and predictions in complex situations.
Although specific datasets, analysis methods, and models vary across domains of interest (including linguistics, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, etc.), there is considerable overlap in core skills and ideas. At the core of these skills is computer programming: giving computers explicit instructions about how to carry out specific desired computations. This class aims to develop this core programming skill (using Python) in the context of social science applications.
Python is a very common language in academia and industry¶
You may encounter Matlab and R frequently in your courses here at UCSD (or in labs that you work in), but Matlab is almost never used outside of universities and R only makes up ~5% of usage in industry - Python comes in at about 44% and is the top ranked general purpose language (i.e. not a language designed for web or database development).