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Online Course

Computational Social Science Capstone Project

University of California, Davis via Coursera

Overview

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CONGRATULATIONS! Not only did you accomplish to finish our intellectual tour de force, but, by now, you also already have all required skills to execute a comprehensive multi-method workflow of computational social science. We will put these skills to work in this final integrative lab, where we are bringing it all together. We scrape data from a social media site (drawing on the skills obtained in the 1st course of this specialization). We then analyze the collected data by visualizing the resulting networks (building on the skills obtained in the 3rd course). We analyze some key aspects of it in depth, using machine learning powered natural language processing (putting to work the insights obtained during the 2nd course). Finally, we use a computer simulation model to explore possible generative mechanism and scrutinize aspects that we did not find in our empirical reality, but that help us to improve this aspect of society (drawing on the skills obtained during the 4th course of this specialization). The result is the first glimpse at a new way of doing social science in a digital age: computational social science. Congratulations! Having done all of this yourself, you can consider yourself a fledgling computational social scientist!

Syllabus

Getting Started and Milestone 1
-For this milestone, you will again web scrape videos from two YouTube channels. You will be assigned two channels to scrape. In contrast to the previous version of this exercise, you will NOT scrape the featured videos of the specified news channel, but the search results of the name of the news channel in combination with your name.

Milestone 2: Social Network Analysis
-In this milestone, you will analyze a social network with help of the software Gephi.

Milestone 3: Natural Language Processing
-In this milestone of our Integrative Lab, you will select two of the key videos identified with help of our SNA, and analyze the sentiment and emotions contained in the comment sections of the videos. We use NLP from IBM Watson for this.

Milestone 4: Agent-Based Computer Simulations
-In this milestone, you will take all the data you created in the previous milestones and use a two-step flow model and discover how ideas can diffuse into society. Through this exercise you will grow your own artificial society from the bottom-up.

Taught by

Martin Hilbert

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Reviews

4.9 rating, based on 18 reviews

Start your review of Computational Social Science Capstone Project

  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    I think this course was amazing due to different things: Methodology: it was very interesting for me to work under the proposed scientific method. I also enjoyed learning how Computational Social Science defines a methodology for creating new knowledge....
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    This final project portion was definitely my favorite course on coursera. With everything that we have learned throughout the course, I was able to use literally every aspect from web-scraping, social networks, and simulations to produce something that I will be able to use outside of school and beyond. It truly is the introduction to computational social science and overall very easy to follow!
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    Great way to bring together all of the previous courses into one interactive lab involving analyzing social networks and building my own, personal artificial society. This project is not intimidating in the slightest, it is actually quite fun. I had never previously coded before, and the coding was easy to follow and replicate. Overall, I am very pleased that I took this course!
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    This course is considered to be the final project to apply all of the previous concepts learned from the previous courses in the Computational Social Science class in Coursera. This is a final test to use all of the skills learned and see how you can apply it in a real life situation.
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    I found the final project to be a good way to integrate all of the course concepts we covered into one cohesive assignment.
  • Anonymous
    i think the window that is opened by technology into the social science aspect is a defining moment for humans, at least now we can imagine how things might connect or work by the dynamic nature of the human relationship . it is an eye opening for none specialized person like me , i can imagine the enthusiasm of social scientist by these new methods and tools.

    final note - despite the complexity of the subject - your made it exciting and draw me to finish it early. thank you for all your efforts .

  • Anonymous
    In the final capstone project, please create an upload button to submit our videos like in previous courses. And enable copy-paste formatting.

    Or are you doing this on purpose??

    Otherwise it was a perfect course to get an overview of big data, AI, and computer simulation. Thank you.
  • Anonymous
    This was an excellent course. The practical nature of this final course in the series enabled me to feel like I could 'put it all together'. I enjoyed using all of the same tools again for a new project and believe it helped me solidify my learning. Highly recommend this course
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    I was amazed at how much I had learned and was able to do while I worked through these videos. You really do come a long way, and best of all, it is a fun journey. This course definitely helped me build some confidence with coding, social network analysis and more.
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    There were some great tasks with a lot of practical significance. Took this course after finishing the previous courses of the specialization, and it really summed up all the hands on work that was done in all the former courses of the specialization.
  • Anonymous
    I very much enjoyed the course! Only regret is that I hoped that it had more challenging, in-depth applications. But this is an introductory online course. So I understand why it is as it is. Thank you for your lectures and materials.
  • Anonymous
    I really enjoyed doing this final capstone --- it was wonderful to to an end-to-end approach to Computational Social Science (and including all of the scientific methods like empirical analysis, theory, etc).
  • Anonymous
    Awesome! This course helped me to understand the basics of too many things! The capstone project is very interesting too in order to understand a possible way of applying the knowlege.
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    Thank you very much for putting up a very good course. I have learned a lot. Makes me appreciate how hard it is to do social science but it is also very rewarding. :-)
  • Anonymous
    The webscrapping part is very interesting and new to me. Wish I could learn more.

    So is the part of network.

    With there were more lessons o n NetLogo
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    Very informative course that I believe will be helpful in my later studies. It would be good attempt to add up new methods to academic inquiry.
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous completed this course.

    Thank you for the course!!! Really great job!!! After Capstone Project I have plan to make some researches in sphere of political communication.
  • Anonymous
    Great way of rounding up all the knowledge, where we basically remember all the activities we did throughout the entire specialization.

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