QTM 350: Data Science Computing

Topic 01: Introduction, Syllabus and Set up

Professor: Davi Moreira

January 18, 2024

Welcome to QTM 350 Data Science Computing

Topic Overview


  • Introductions

  • Motivation

  • Course Overview and Logistics

  • Set up

  • IDEs

    • Jupyter
    • Quarto

Introductions

Instructor

davi.moreira@emory.edu

https://davi- moreira.github.io/

  • Visiting Assistant Professor in the QTM Department at Emory University;


  • My academic work addresses Political Communication, Data Science, Text as Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Comparative Politics.


Instructor’s Passions

Instructor’s Passions

Students


  • It is your turn! - 5 minutes


  • Present yourself to your left/right colleague and tell her/him what are the current two main passions in your life.

Motivation

What is Data Science?

What did Data Science need to emerge?

Large-scale data + algorithms to answer questions

Rise of the digital information age

Social Media Data

New Data Formats: Image, text, videos..

Online Research

Powerful and Cheap Computer Power

As a consequence:

  • Abundance of data we can use for research and governments can use to make better decisions

    • Novel research questions

    • New ways to answer old, long-standing research questions

  • New technologies also have social implications and can generate important policy questions.

    • Privacy issues

    • Use of technology by bad actors.

    • Use of technology by governments to censor/monitor citizens.

    • etc…

Course Overview and Logistics

Logistics

Transiton: Coding!

Jupyter:

See Jupyter Notebook in the Class Website

Quarto

See Quarto Notebook in the Class Website

Summary

Summary

Some key things to take from this topic:

  • Data Science is about data:

    • Data collection;
    • Data management;
    • Data storage;
    • Data structure;
    • Data, Data, Data ...

  • Data Science is also about…

    • Collaboration!

  • The schedule is tentative;

  • Jupiter Notebook will be the main tool of the course, but there are other IDEs:

    • Google Colab
    • Quarto

Thank you!

Data Science Computing