Correspondence

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