+ info: WILEY Blackwell
Computational methods are rapidly gaining popularity in social science disciplines such as sociology, political science, psychology, (political) communication and media studies and are increasingly becoming part of the curriculum. Yet, there is no textbook that teaches in a practical way how computational methods originating from computer science, data science, and computer linguistics can be used within these disciplines.
The book uses an integrated approach to teach computational techniques in the context of social science and communication studies questions. Methods and code examples are directly linked to social science theory and cases from the literature. All techniques in the book are explained with code examples in both Python and R. The book teaches data analytics, computational thinking, and programming skills that have broad value in the private sector and within academia.
Students can use the book to learn useful techniques for analysing data that are relevant to the social sciences such as data management and visualization and text analysis. Students do not need to have programming experience, but can pick up the needed programming skills while working with the provided examples. As far as possible, all examples are linked to relevant societal questions, communication processes and social science theory and show how the techniques can be used to answer interesting and relevant questions. The book can be used cover-to-cover and will give students a very thorough introduction to computational social science, but it is also possible to use only relevant chapters.
