Seminar
Colors of the continuous
Quantitative surveys. Social Science Toolkit
Wednesday 25 September 2024 Wednesday 25 September 2024
From 3 to 6 PM
ENS-PSL, salle de conférences du Centre Sciences des Données
ENS-PSL
45 rue d'Ulm
75005 Paris
France
Second session of the course "Enquêtes quantitatives. Boîte à outils pour sciences sociales", given by Théo Boulakia.
You're looking at a rate, a proportion, a percentage, a ratio of some kind, which varies spatially. Abstention rate, unemployment rate, population density. A map is needed. Color invites itself. You can already imagine a cameo of blue, invisible transitions that insensitively take the eye from the lightest to the darkest hues. In fact, this is what your software offers by default. And that's a very bad idea. To be effective, your map needs discontinuity. You'll have to cut your variable into slices, or discretize it. Depending on the distribution of your data and your objectives, you'll be able to choose from a dozen or so approaches and algorithms. This session will also cover color palettes, inclusion, missing data and extreme values. Two surveys will accompany us: on the Chernobyl cloud and French electoral life.
Wednesday 25 September 2024
Quantitative surveys. Social Science Toolkit
S1 2024-2025.
Data analysis course in social sciences, delivered by Théo Boulakia. The sessions take place on Mondays, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., in the conference room of the Data Science Center (ENS-PSL, 45 rue d'Ulm, at the top of stairs B or C).
Goals of the course: This course offers an introduction to various quantitative methods based on social science surveys. Each session is organized around the meeting between a question (sociological, anthropological, historiographical), data and a method: cartography, dimensionality reduction, partitioning, sequence analysis, textual analysis, Bayesian statistics. The objective of the course is to acquire a schematic understanding of the implementation of these methods, their merits and their limitations. How to represent spatial data and temporal sequences? What do Bayesian statistics provide that the frequentist approach lacks? How to analyze the morpho-synthactic properties of a text? How to go from a large number of variables to a small number of classes? These questions will arise in context, in a dynamic of adjustment between data, method and research question (an investigation dynamic). Programming questions will be covered only in broad terms, no experience in this area is required.
Validation: Submit a four-page document applying one of the methods discovered in progress to your own data: presentation of the data, interest of the method, implementation and interpretation. People without programming experience will be assisted with implementation.
Registration : theo.boulakia [a] ens.psl.eu
