As organizational life continues to move online, it is tracked through various electronic media, such as websites, platforms, and social networks. All of our movements are being recorded as billions of digital traces. The ability to analyze the large-scale datasets generated by this digital activity is becoming a necessary skill for social scientists. To ensure that social science students are prepared, I have designed, organized, and led, a weeklong, all-day intensive workshop in big data and computational methods for PhD students called Big Data Camp. In this workshop, we introduce students to Python, SQL databases, the command line, and Python packages such as pandas, Beautiful Soup, Gensim and NLTK. While the first ICOS Big Data Camp occurred in 2013, from 2016-2018 I restructured and redesigned it to be:
Everyone is capable of learning and using these tools. And it can be a lot of fun. If you would be interestied in having your students, workers, or community members get familiar with computational tools, please contact me. I would love to talk with you about teaching Big Data Camp as a workshop, adapting it to be a class, or structuring it to fit whatever your needs might be. I can be contacted here. Also please look at the Big Data Camp wesbite or examine the Github repository from the 2018 camp for sample code downloads.