Computational Social Science Capstone Project (Coursera)

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!

Course 5 of 5 in the Computational Social Science Specialization

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Getting Started

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.

WEEK 2

Social Network Analysis

In this milestone, you will analyze a social network with help of the software Gephi.

WEEK 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.

WEEK 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.