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

Unfortunately, registration is over and we were oversubscribed and have a large waitlist. Sorry about that! This is our second workshop and we do hope to run version of these again in the future.

Interested in being a mentor? We are still intersted in mentors, however. 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 Communications (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 6:30pm as you can. Most people will finish early but some people will definitely need the full 3 hours. It's hard to know in advance where problems will crop up so please come on time even if you are confident.

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

Session 1 (Saturday November 8th)

Come to Savory Hall (SAV) 260 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

Venue and Logistics

Location

The University of Washington Department of Communication is hosting the event and all of our events except the Saturday morning lectures will be held in the Communications building (CMU) on the Seattle UW campus. This includes the Friday setup and the and all of the afternoon projects. Although we will be working multiple rooms, we will be based out of CMU 104 so please come here first. 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.

Because we have grown so big, we have to move the lectures into a larger lecture hall than the CMU building has. We will be in Savery Hall 260 (map) which is a short 5 minute walk from the Communications building where we will have lunch, the afternoon sessions, and the Friday setup. Please meet at Savery Hall 260 on the three Saturday mornings at 9:45.

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.

One important note is that Huskies football games will be played at UW on Saturday November 8th and 22nd. The November 8th game will start at 4pm and the time for the November 22nd game has not been set. Parking may be more complicated and it might be worth considering taking public transit.

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

What to bring

1. a laptop
   • for Session 0 make sure that you have about 1GB of space free so you can install Python and all the necessary other software
   • for Sessions 1-3 bring your laptop with Python set up
2. a power cord
3. 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.