As online communities and social interactions become increasingly complex, the ability to computationally analyze large amounts of data to gain insight on social phenomena has become essentials. With new techniques, datasets, and tools available to us, we have the opportunity to better understand the ways in which online communities function and return to questions that were previously impossible to answer.

We’ll talk about some of the ideas and questions that computational sociologists are currently asking, with an eye towards interactions within online communities. I’ll draw on some of my work at The Coral Project, a collaboration between The New York Times, Washington Post, and Mozilla to rethink online community for news sites. Then, we’ll dive into how to get started using Python and the data analysis library agate, to answer some of these questions. I’ll be talking about most of this from the perspective of someone who learned how to use Python for data analysis within the past year. You’ll get the most out of the session if you’ve used Python for some basic data analysis before, but folks from all backgrounds are welcome.