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Python Programming for Social Scientists: Big Data, Web Scraping and Other Useful Programming Tricks

Course Dates and Times

Friday 26 July 13:00–15:00 and 15:30–18:00

Saturday 27 July 09:00–12:30 and 14:00–17:30

Eszter Somos

somoseszter@gmail.com

Institution:

With more and more data available on the web, skills for collecting and processing them in an automated manner are becoming increasingly valuable.

This course offers an introduction to programming with Python, starting from the basics, and focusing on solving problems around data collection, processing and analysis.

We will also discuss what types of problems Python is right for, and explore how to extend your knowledge beyond this course.

By the end of this course, you should have enough programming experience to start working in any area of computation and data-intensive research.

ECTS Credits for this course

Instructor Bio

Eszter Somos is currently an associate at Gravity R&D, a company specializing in the development and maintaining of recommendation systems. She has been doing data mining since 2015, when she switched from being a PhD student at the University of Hull researching autobiographical memory to working for startup companies.

Her main focus is exploratory data analysis, algorithm fine tuning, and conducting AB testing in online environments. She is experienced in working with data from various sectors, like online job markets, travel metasearch, webshops, and video streaming sites.

The course is ten 1.5 hour sessions of mostly hands-on programming. A computer is required during most of the lectures.

By the end of this course, you will have experience with techniques vital to effective data management:

The basic syntax and use of Python as a data analysis tool, including writing and executing scripts to automate common tasks, using the IPython interpreter for interactive exploration of data and code, and using the Jupyter notebook to share and collaborate.
Loading data from a variety of common formats such as csv, html, json
Manipulating data efficiently with Pandas
Basic web scraping
Use of web APIs
Use of special python packages such as data visualisation libraries

No programming experience is required, but you would benefit strongly from prior knowledge of Stata, R or other languages.

Day	Topic	Details
1	Why Python? First steps with python, Ipython notebook Scraping from the Web
2	Pandas basics Data analysis and visualization
3	• Parsing scraped data, Pandas basics • Data analysis and visualization

Day	Readings
Note	Given the practical nature of the class there is no necessary reading but these online tutorials might be useful, and the blog will give you an idea why Python is particularly useful for data analysis. Learn Python the Hard Way Google's Python Class 10 Reasons Python Rocks for Research (And a Few Reasons it Doesn’t)

Day

Readings

Note

Given the practical nature of the class there is no necessary reading but these online tutorials might be useful, and the blog will give you an idea why Python is particularly useful for data analysis.

Software Requirements

Please install Python 3 and Anaconda 3.6 before class, and ensure they work properly.

Hardware Requirements

Please bring your own laptop.

Install the app