The Centre for Data, Culture & Society is delighted to announce applications for the 2024 Summer School are now underway.

Held in Edinburgh Futures Institute, the Summer School will be an intensive, 5-day, in-person event, with a practical focus. There will be a choice of two streams, which will run throughout the week: A Gentle Introduction to Coding for Data Analysis, and Text and Data Analysis in the Wild. Find out more about each stream and which best suits your needs below. 

A Gentle Introduction to Coding for Data Analysis

This course is designed for researchers who are complete beginners with no prior knowledge of coding and data analysis. Through lectures and exercises, attendees will learn how to code in Python, starting from core concepts such as variables and loops, through to coding live data visualisation. 

The course explores the basics of programming: variables, functions, loops, operating on data structures, data wrangling, and visualisation.

By the end of the course, attendees will understand how to bridge the gap between humans and computers, and how to apply the skills they have learnt to their own data analysis and research. This course is intended to be a foundation for those starting out with data-led Humanities and Social Sciences research.

Text and Data Analysis in the Wild

This course is designed to help researchers with coding experience understand how data and text analysis projects are performed in a research environment. 

It starts with identifying a series of research questions connected to this year’s core topic (Living in Scotland Past and Present). 

Then it explores how computational methods can be used to obtain, clean, and analyse structured and unstructured datasets in R to answer those questions. 

Topics will include data wrangling, web scraping, text analysis, sentiment analysis, statistics, and data visualisation.