Greetings fellow Cascadians!
By popular demand, I am helping organize yet another round of Community
Data Science Workshop
<http://wiki.communitydata.cc/Community_Data_Science_Workshops_(Fall_2015)>
with
Benjamin Mako Hill. Registration is open until October 2nd! Read on for
details.
The series consists of three-and-a-half day-long workshops in October and
November. They are intended for anyone interested in learning how to use
programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online
communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free and open source software
projects, civic media, etc. These will be an improved version of the workshops
we have run for the past two years
<http://escience.washington.edu/blog/community-data-science-workshops-spring-2015>
.
The Community Data Science workshops are for people with no previous
programming experience and, thanks to sponsorship from UW's eScience
Institute <http://escience.washington.edu/> and Department of Communication
<http://www.com.washington.edu/>, are free of charge and open to anyone.
Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to
use web data and the Python programming language to gather and manipulate
data, test hypotheses, and generate graphical visualizations to answer
questions like:
- Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter
hashtag?
- Which bike routes in Seattle receive the most traffic on rainy Winter
days?
- Who has written the most Wikipedia articles about Harry Potter?
The skills you learn in these workshops can be used to gather & analyze
data from thousands of other sources. All you need is a lively imagination
and an open API.
Details and dates are online here:
http://wiki.communitydata.cc/CDSW_Fall_2015
If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration at the
link above before October 2nd. Priority is given to people who can attend
all the sessions. Register soon because we have been oversubscribed both
previous times we have run these workshops!
If you already know how to program in Python, it would be really awesome if
you would volunteer 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. If you’re interested,
there’s a link on the program page linked above, or you can send me an
email.
Hope to see you there,
Jonathan
(On behalf of Mako, Mika, Tommy, Ben, Dharma, the Community Data Science
Research Group <http://communitydata.cc/>, and all the CDSW mentors.)