There is a revolution going on in the social sciences: the rise of computational social science! Huge new sources of data on social behaviour are being combined with new analytical techniques to change the fundaments of how social science takes place. This class is aimed at social scientists who want to learn the basics of one of the key skills in the computational social science toolkit: the python programming language.

The class is aimed at complete beginners with no previous programming experience (but with an interest to learn!). During the class, we will learn the fundamentals of the Python programming language, looking at (for example) how to control the flow of code with loops and conditional statements, how to handle input and output to files, how to write functions, and more.

The class is intended as a foundational course which will enable those completing it to go on to learn other applied methods which require Python, especially the social media data mining class which is to be held in the Spring term. Those who already have a background in Python may wish to skip this course and take the one on data mining.