Event Recap: Statistical Computing in R and Mathematics Summer Workshops

Faculty Advisors: Aaron Erlich (Political Science) and Thomas Soehl (Sociology)

August 23 to 25 and August 28 to 30 2017

Quantitative approaches comprise a large and growing part of social science and humanities research. It is increasingly difficult to take graduate level courses and read important papers in your field without and understanding of statistical inference, computer programming, and mathematical models.  Departments across McGill offer a wide range of courses in quantitative methods and data science but sometimes students feel inadequately prepared.

To overcome these entry hurdles, the Centre for Social and Cultural Data Science (CSCDS) in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC), the Geographic Information Centre and the Departments of Political Science and Sociology organized two three-day workshops during the last days of summer. In the R-workshop, we helped students up the first and steepest part of the learning curve in statistical computing and introduced data management skills that will save a lot of time. The Math-camp (re-) introduced the fundamental mathematical concepts that underlie all quantitative methods.

These inaugural workshops proved a great success; we had over 80 people sign up, showing the high demand for such courses! In each of the workshops, we had about 40 participants from eight different departments across different faculties including Political Science, Sociology, Management, Information Studies, Biomedical Ethics and others. Our participants were mainly incoming graduate students, but also those working on their dissertations. A few faculty members also attended! Most impressively,  almost everybody stuck it out through all three workshop days, despite the fantastic weather.

A big thank you to our instructors Tim Elrick and Alex Miltsov as well as Caitrin Armstrong, Costin Ciobanu, Aengus Bridgman, and Sakeef Karim who helped make the event a success.

 

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