The Center for Information Technology and Society, with UCSB Library’s Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory, are offering workshops to CITS students and faculty to broaden their technical knowledge.

The CITS/IT&S workshops will focus on Big Data, Social Network Analysis, and Scraping/Gathering Data for Social Media Analyses. Workshops are taught by Dr. Ziad Matni and Devin Cornell.

No previous experience with specific software tools is required. However, for those who are unfamiliar with Python (for Gathering Data from Social Media), the library Collaboratory is offering CITS priority reservations at its 2-day Software Carpentry Workshops.

Big Data Uses in Social Media Research  (Created and taught by Dr. Ziad Matni) April 20

 SIGNUP HERE

This 1 day (6-8 hour) workshop explores uses of Big Data (and more generally, Data Science) methods for use with extracting, analyzing, and visualizing social media data in the context of social science and humanities research questions. The workshop covers basic concepts of Big Data and Data Science, including hands-on exercises of data analysis and data visualization utilizing a “Big” data set extracted from one or several social media sources. The goal of the workshop is to give the participant enough of a background to have an appreciable understanding of the role of Big Data and its value, and some techniques involved in analyzing it.