Title | Doing Computational Social Science |
Publication Type | Book |
Year of Publication | 2022 |
Authors | McLevey, J. |
Publisher | Sage |
City | London, UK |
Abstract |
My book Doing Computational Social Science was published by Sage at the start of 2022 and is currently available for purchase. Computational approaches offer exciting opportunities for us to do social science differently. This beginner’s guide discusses a range of computational methods and how to use them to study the problems and questions you want to research. It assumes no knowledge of programming, offering step-by-step guidance for coding in Python and drawing on examples of real data analysis to demonstrate how you can apply each approach in any discipline. The book also considers important principles of social scientific computing, including transparency, accountability and reproducibility; understands the realities of completing research projects and offers advice for dealing with issues such as messy or incomplete data and systematic biases; and empowers you to learn at your own pace, with online resources including screencast tutorials and datasets that enable you to practice your skills and get up to speed. For anyone who wants to use computational methods to conduct a social science research project, this book equips you with the skills, good habits and best working practices to do rigorous, high quality work. ContentsPart I: Foundations Part II: Fundamentals of text analysis Part III: Fundamentals of network analysis Part IV: Research ethics and machine learning Part V: Bayesian machine learning and probabilistic programming Part VI: Bayesian data analysis and latent variable modelling with relational and text data Part VII: Embeddings, transformer models and named entity recognition Supplementary ResourcesYou can find the supplementary materials for the book on the Sage website and on Github. |