Welcome

Welcome

This course introduces different methods and examples of how to incorporate programming in Python in society in culture. The course consist of two modules, which can be found in the menu on the left. The first one - Basics - introduces the basics of Python, leading to how Python can be used for data exploration, covering several topics such as simple calculations, creating lists and performing operations on them.The second course - Machine learning for society and culture - then introduces interactive data analysis with Python by working though several research use cases using basic machine learning.

To cover these subjects we will work with Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter Notebooks are a great data exploration and analysis environment. They allow you to use Python more interactively. Python is of course a fully-fledged programming language for writing long chunks of code and complex applications. But in data analysis you often just want to run one step a time and change things fast. Jupyter Notebooks allow you to do just that. These introduction notebooks explore this aspect. This Jupyter book shows only the html of the notebook themselves, you can have a look at the exercises, but to work with them yourself you can access them though Binder by clicking on the little rocket in the upper right corner, don’t worry if it takes a while to load. The great thing about running the exercises in Binder is that it allows you to work on them in an executable environment that already has Python and all the libraries and tools you will need installed, so you won’t have to download these.

If you want to work outside of Binder you can also find the full notebooks for this course at https://github.com/zarahvh/dimpah/tree/master/Notebooks. If you go to the GitHub page you can download the notebooks and run a more interactive session. You can also find many more additional sessions if you would like to continue learning.