Table of Contents

• 0. To-Do
• 1. Logistics
  • 1.1 Room
  • 1.2 Schedule
  • 1.3 Personnel
  • 1.4 Financial Support
• 2. Technology
  • 2.1 Software
  • 2.2 Course Sites
• 3. Curriculum
• 4. Assignments & Final Projects

0. To-Do

During Previous Spring:

• schedule / find room
• find instructor

During Summer:

• set up bCourses
• finalize syllabus
• remove assignments from github
• finalize materials on github
• market class
• finalize (or at least schedule) assignments and final project
• update and test your own installations

At the end of the fall:

• branch off (archive) a copy of the course (see Fall 2015 branch for example)

1. Logistics

1.1 The Room

Checklist for a good room

• Projector
• White board (not behind the projector)
• Outlets
• Forward-facing desks

Room Options

• 791 Barrows (Fall 2016)
• 202 Barrows (Fall 2015): Very bad, don't use it! No whiteboards, no outlets, etc.
• Academic Innovation Studio (117 Dwinelle): Haven't used it but it looks perfect.

1.2 Schedule

• 2x a week, 2 hours each session

1.3 Personnel

Fall 2016

• Rachel Bernhard (main instructor)
• Laura Stoker (Instructor of Record)

Fall 2015

• Rochelle Terman (main instructor)
• Laura Stoker (Instructor of Record)
• Chris Kennedy (hardware support)
• Shinhye Choi (guest speaker, GeoSpatial Analysis)
• Zawadi Rucks Ahidiana-Massac (guest speaker, Qualitative Data Analysis)

1.4 Financial Support

• DH @ Berkeley grant (Fall 2015) provided support for curriculum development, and guest speakers / support.

2. Technology

2.1 Software

See B_Install for current software.

Python

• We used Python 2 in 2015. In 2016 we switched to Python 3.
• Anaconda worked well for most students.
• Ipython (Jupyter) Notebooks was our main platform; comes with anaconda.

R

• R / Rstudio was unproblematic.

Bash

• Gitbash for windows users was generally okay, although some had a few bugs running python scripts.

2.2 Course Sites

bCourses

We use bCourses for:

• Communication: We use bcourses for both announcements and student question. Students ask questions about class material and assignments through the bcourse website so that everyone can benefit from the discussion.
• Assignments: Students turn in their assignments (as PDFs) through bcourses, where the instructor grades and gives feedback. We also use bcourses to track attendance and calculate final grades.

Github

All course materials will be posted on Github at https://github.com/rochelleterman/PS239T, including class notes, code demonstrations, sample data, and assignments. Students are encouraged to submit pull requests to this repository, for example if they find a particularly helpful resource that would aid other students. Students are required to use GitHub for their final projects, which will be publicly available, unless they have special considerations (e.g. proprietary data).

3. Curriculum

3.1 Applications

We have materials for the following topics:

Topic	Language	Taught	Assignment?	Guest Instructor	Notes
APIs	Python, R	2015	Yes	NA	We have materials on API requests in BOTH Python and R. In 2015 we used the Python version.
Webscraping	Pythong	2015	Yes	NA
Computational Text Analysis	R	2015	See Notes	NA	Materials taken from a week-long intensive, so there's too much to be taught in one week. In 2015, students were encouraged to look through extra materials and do some analysis on any corpus as the assignment.
GeoSpatial	R	2015	No	Shinhye Choi	Code in repo
Qualitative Data Analysis	AtlasTI, Dedoose(?)	2015	No	Zawadi Rucks	Slides in repo
Git / Github	Git / bash	2015	See Notes	NA	In 2015, students had to use github for their final projects
Big Data / Efficiency	R	NA	See Notes	NA	Never taught, but we have lecture materials and an assignment in the Repo
Mechanical Turk / Qualtrics		2016?

4. Assignments & Final Project