2 graduate courses in the Fall 2026 Graduate Calendar.
The explosion of digital data is revolutionizing the way we learn about the world. This course focuses on the knowledge and skills necessary for doing high-quality social scientific research with digital data. Students will be introduced to the programming language Python, and will earn to collect and analyze digital data using computational methods.
Every day, nuanced decisions are made at the personal level (what job offer to accept), an organizational level (whether to recall a faulty product), and in the form of public policy (when and where to develop renewable energy). This course introduces decision analytic tools for systematically structuring messy problems to identify trade-offs among different decisions and to explore them intelligibly. For public policy problems, the challenges of values conflicts and "truth decay" (i.e., the political polarization or outright rejection of facts) will be considered. Additional decision contexts that push the limits of traditional analytic approaches will also be addressed (e.g. wicked problems, deep uncertainty).