The course consists of one lecture and two practical sessions per week. For the practical sessions, the group will be split into 5-6 groups of equal size.


Rooms and Times

Class Teacher Time
Lectures Wouter van Atteveldt Monday 13:30
Practical Session 1 (CS/CW) Gianni Quaedvlieg Tuesday, 9:00 & Thursday, 11:00
Practical Session 3 (AI) Alberto López-Ortega Tuesday, 9:00 & Thursday, 11:00
Practical Session 5 (CS/CW) Kasper Welbers Tuesday, 11:00 & Thursday, 09:00
Practical Session 6 (CW) Gianni Quaedvlieg Tuesday, 11:00 & Thursday, 09:00
Practical Session 7 (AI) Sofia Gil-Clavel Tuesday, 11:00 & Thursday, 09:00

See the schedule website for rooms

Sessions 3 and 7 (AI) are reserved for students AI & Governance. Sessions 1 and 5 (CS/CW) are bilingual sessions in the English and Dutch tracks of communication science. Of course, students in the Dutch track are free to ask questions and communicate with the teacher in Dutch. Session 6 (CW) is in Dutch only. Sessions 2, 4 and 8 have been merged into other groups due to lower student numbers than expected.



Overview

Day Week Type Content Assignment
Part I: Introduction and Automated Text Analysis
Monday 1 Lecture Introduction to Computational Methods in Communication Science
Tuesday 1 Practical session Data Wrangling using the tidyverse and tidytext
Thursday 1 Practical session Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Visualization Homework Assignment 1
Monday 2 Lecture Automated Text Analysis and Dictionary Approaches
Tuesday 2 Practical session Basic Text Analysis using tidytext
Thursday 2 Practical session Dictionary Approaches using tidytext Homework Assignment 2
Part II: Text Classification using Machine Learning
Monday 3 Lecture Text Classification Using Machine Learning
Tuesday 3 Practical session Supervised text classification using Naive Bayes and neural networks
Thursday 3 Practical session Supervised text classification with wordembeddings and neural networks Homework Assignment 3
Monday 4 Lecture Transformers and Large Language Models
Tuesday 4 Practical session Zero-Shot Classification Using Transformers/GPT/llama
Thursday 4 Practical session Few-Shot Classification Using GPT/llama Homework Assignment 4
Exam week
Friday 5 Exam Multiple-Choice Exam (Content of Part I & II)
Part III: Practical Group Projects
Monday 6 Lecture Summary and Introduction to Group Projects
Tuesday 6 Practical session Meeting with supervisor
Thursday 6 Practical session Meeting with supervisor
Monday 7 No lecture
Tuesday 7 Practical session Meeting with supervisor
Thursday 7 Practical session Meeting with supervisor
Tuesday 8 Conference Presentation of Group Projects 10-min talk

This course is published under the following license.