CDCS Summer School 2024, University of Edinburgh, June 10–14, 2024
The Centre for Data, Culture & Society at the University of Edinburgh is delighted to announce that applications are now open for our 2024 Summer School. The course is primarily aimed at researchers from higher education institutions who are interested in developing their digital and computational skills.
The Summer School is an intensive, 5-day, in-person event, with a practical focus. The course is comprised of two parallel streams to accommodate different skill levels. The two streams are A Gentle Introduction to Coding for Data Analysis and Text & Data Analysis in the Wild. No previous knowledge of coding is required to attend the first stream, a general knowledge of the RStudio interface and coding is required to attend the second.
A Gentle Introduction to Coding for Data Analysis
This course is designed for researchers who are complete beginners with no prior knowledge of coding and data analysis. Through instruction and exercises, attendees will learn how to code in Python, starting from the basics and building to create an interactive dashboard with live data. The course explores the basics of programming: variables, functions, loops, operating on data structures, data wrangling, and visualisation. By the end of the course, attendees will understand how to bridge the gap between humans and computers, and how to apply the skills they have learnt to their own data analysis and research. This course is intended to be a oundation for those intending to start a journey towards analysing Humanities and Social Sciences research data.
Text & Data Analysis in the Wild
This course is designed to help researchers with coding experience understand how data and text analysis projects are performed in a research environment. It starts with identifying a series of research questions connected to this year’s core topic (Living in Scotland Past and Present). Then it explores how computational methods can be used to obtain, clean, and analyse structured and unstructured datasets in R to answer those questions. Topics will include data wrangling, web scraping, text analysis, sentiment analysis, statistics, and data visualisation.
The general registration fee for the Summer School is £250. This fee is waived for University of Edinburgh students and staff. If you are an SGSAH-funded doctoral researcher, you may be considered for a supported place.