Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)

Welcome to the page for the Fall 2014 Community Data Science Workshops (CDSW) — a series of four sessions designed to introduce some of the basic tools of programming and analysis of data from online communities to absolute beginners.

The CDSW will be held on the evening of Friday November 7 and all day on Saturdays 8th, 15th, and 22nd at the University of Washington, Seattle. This pages includes links to the curriculum we we will use. We ran these sessions once before in in Spring 2014. Although we are updating the curriculum, you can see details of what we did last time on the archived version of the website for the previous workshop.

Registration

If you are interested in registering, please go read the announcement for the workshops which includes a link to our registration form.

Interested in being a mentor? If you already have experience with Python, please consider helping out at the sessions as a mentor. Being a mentor will involve working with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is required. And we’ll feed you! Because we want to keep a very high mentor to student ratio, recruiting more mentors means we can accept more participants. If you’re interested, email makohill@uw.edu. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Schedule

All sessions are interactive and involve you programming on your own and on your own laptop. Everybody attending should bring a laptop and a power cord so that they don't run out of battery.

Session 0 (Friday November 7th Evening 6:30-9:30pm)

Come to CMU 104 between 6:30 and 9:30pm. It's OK if you come a little late but you'll want to have as much time as you can to finish the setup and self-directed assignments so come as close to 6pm as you can.

During this session, mentors will help you:

set up your development environment
learn how to execute Python code from a file and interactively from a Python prompt
learn about printing and using Python as a calculator

We understand that there are some people who will attend the Saturday workshop but who cannot make it the Friday session. That's OK but it means that you'll be on your own and responsible to get everything set up before our first meeting on Saturday morning. We'll post all the information for the Friday session on this page and you will able to follow along.

>>Click here for the the setup and tutorial material.<<

Session 1 (Saturday November 8th)

Come to CMU 104 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We want to start lecturing promptly at 10am.

Morning, 10am-noon: A 2 hour lecture-based introduction to the Python programming language
Lunch, noon-1pm: We'll provide lunch
Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm: Python practice through short projects on a variety of fun and practical topics
Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Session 2 (Saturday November 15th)

Come to CMU 104 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We want to start lecturing promptly at 10am.

Please come prepared to start working in your Python interpreter during the lesson. If you are going to be bringing a different computer than the one you brough and setup last time, you will need to go through the setup section of the setup and tutorial session from the first Friday session. You don't need to do the tutorial or CodeAcademy lessons again unless you think that you could use a refresher. You can also skip the sections about installing Colorwall and Wordplay. We won't be looking at those in this session.

To participate in the Twitter afternoon session, you must have registered with Twitter as a developer before the session by following the Twitter authentication setup instructions. If you did not do this, or if you tried but did not succeed, please attend one of the other two sessions instead.

Morning, 10am-noon: A 2 hour lecture-based introduction to the web APIs
Lunch, noon-1pm: We'll provide lunch!
Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm: Python and API practice through short projects
Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Session 3 (Saturday November 22nd)

Come to CMU 104 by 9:45am. You will need time to get settled and setup. We want to start lecturing promptly at 10am.

Please come prepared to start working in your Python interpreter during the lesson. If you are going to be bringing a different computer than the one you brough and setup last time, you will need to go through the setup section of the setup and tutorial session from the first Friday session. You don't need to do the tutorial or CodeAcademy lessons again unless you think that you could use a refresher. You can also skip the sections about installing Colorwall and Wordplay. We won't be looking at those in this session.

In the lecture, we're going to be doing building some simple visualizations online in Google Docs. Please make sure you have a Google Account you can use for the session and poke around at and create a new Google Spreadsheet. I suspect that most of you are going to use Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, Gnumeric, etc., in your work after the class but using Google Docs means that we'll all be using the same software during the lecture.

Morning, 10am-noon: A 2 hour lecture-based introduction to data analysis
Lunch, noon-1pm: We'll provide lunch! And not pizza this time!
Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm: Python and analysis practice through short projects
Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Resources

Saturday May 3rd lecture
Saturday May 3rd projects
Introduction to APIs in Python CodeAcademy exercises - Includes information on using APIs from NPR, Bitly, Sunlight Foundation, and PlaceKitten
Saturday May 31st lecture
Saturday May 31st projects

Venue and Logistics

Location

The University of Washington Department of Communication is hosting the event. We are located in the Communications building (CMU) on the Seattle UW campus. The Friday setup and the morning lectures will both be held in CMU 104. We will move into other rooms in the building for the workshop parts of the sessions.

You can find the building on this Google map or on this campus map from UW.

Parking at UW is available but is not free. There is self-serve parking as well as gatehouses that are staffed from 7am on Saturday and can issue you parking passes and point you to an appropriate lot. More details are on the UW Commuter Services website for Visitors and Guests. UW is also well served by public transportation and easily accessible by bicycle with the Burke Giilman Trail.

If you have any questions about the event, you can contact makohill@uw.edu.

What to bring

a laptop (ideally one with a Python environment set up. See Session 0 information, above)
a power cord
a sense of adventure!

Food

Thanks to generous sponsorship by the eScience Institute at UW, we will provide catered lunchs during the Saturday sessions. Although we haven't figured out the menu, we will make sure to have plenty of vegetarian and vegan options. If the food we have doesn't doesn't work for you, there is a food court open for lunch in the HUB (the UW student center) that is almost directly next door.

Social Media

We use the hashtag #cdsw

Thanks!

This event would be possible without all the volunteerw mentors, the advice and direction of Open Hatch and support of the UW Department of Communication and UW eScience Institute.