| Course Title: Special Topics in Sociology: 'Text as Data II: Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences' |
| Start Date: 01/27/2026 End Date: 05/12/2026 |
| Term: Spring Semester 2026 |
| Description: How can the social sciences benefit from remarkable advances in hardware and software that have unlocked new approaches to using text-as-data? This course interrogates the use of text-as-data from both social scientific and computational perspectives. Students will consider how meaning and context are theorized and how scale is achieved in the analysis of text by social scientists and computational experts. This new frontier will be explored in a hands-on manner; by the end of the course, students will deploy machine learning models to gain insights from large bodies of text such that we may evaluate the utility of these approaches in our quest for insight into the social world. |
| Distribution(s): III - Social Sciences , TP - Topics Course |
| Academic Level Of Course: Undergraduate | Credits:4.00 |
| Faculty | Phone | Email address |
| Ben Gebre-Medhin | 413-538-2803 | bgebreme@mtholyoke.edu |
| Meeting Dates | Method | Meeting days | Meeting times | Building name | Room | Frequency |
| 01/27/2026 - 05/12/2026 | Seminar | Tuesday and Thursday | 01:45PM - 03:00PM | TBA | TBA | Weekly |
| Requisite Courses | ||
| Prereq: 8 credits in Sociology including SOCI-216TX. | Take previously | Required |
| Comments |
| Additional Comments |
| Course Tags | ||
| DATA0003 | DATA-SE: Data Science Elective Course | This course is an elective option for the Data Science major. |
| Cross-listed Sections |
| None |
| Course Availability | ||||
| Section status: Open | Capacity: 18 | Enrollment: 12 | Available: 6 | Waitlist: 0 |
BOOK INFORMATION
| Book List | Required | Publisher Full Price |
| To be determined. |
| Additional Book Comments |
| This is NOT the complete book list for this class. |