Teaching
Current Teaching at Northwestern University
COMM_ST 395: Digital Propaganda and Repression (Undergraduate lecture)
MTS 525: Computational Communication Research (Ph.D. seminar)
Previous Teaching
COMM 1: Introduction to Communication (Undergraduate lecture; Teaching assistant for Jeff Hancock)
COMM 106/206: Communication Research Methods (Undergraduate/graduate seminar; Teaching assistant for Anna Gibson)
Teaching Resources
R Programming for Beginners
R is a functional open-source programming language widely used in statistical analysis and visualization. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. Similar to any programming language, learning R may not be easy at the beginning, but once you get into it, you can explore more powerful things with R. If you are interested in learning R programming, these resources could be helpful:
- Getting started with R/RStudio: I wrote this instruction for my students in the course Communication Research Methods at Stanford University. In this instruction, you will find more details on how to install R and Rstudio, and some useful resources to help you familiarize with R.
- R practice code for beginners: This code is based on my teaching materials for the course Communication Research Methods at Stanford University. If you are a beginner to R programming, you can run this R code line by line in the R console (bottom left quadrant in R Studio) and learn from setting work directory to creating simple plots.
- Swirl: Swirl is an interactive R package that helps beginners to learn R programming and data science through a fun way. You can install swirl package in your RStudio by following the instructions. By Swirl, you can work through short lessons to start writing R codes.
Books that I Will Recommend
Here are some books that I would recommend for people who want to systematically learn quantitative social science research and computational social science research:
- Quantitative social science: An introduction: a must-read for every quantitative social scientist.
- Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences: a fantastic guide for people who want to learn computational text analysis.
- Images as Data for Social Science Research: An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Nets for Image Classification: a perfect guide for image-as-data research methods.
- Research Handbook on Visual Politics: a new research handbook including my book chapter with Yilang Peng on how to use computational visual analysis to study political communication.