Schedule

Lectures are on Wednesdays, 13:00–15:00 in CLM.2.02. Seminars are on Thursdays. Check your timetable for your assigned seminar time and room.

There are two in-person computer-based practical tests: a mid-term on Thursday, 12 November (during week 7 seminars, which are extended), and a final on Friday 15 January 2027. See Assessments for more information.

Lecture slides, seminar materials and supplementary resources are in the course GitHub organisation. Enrolled students should start at Getting started with MY472.

Topics may be adjusted during the term as needed.

Week 1: The computational core

Lecture: 30 September

This week introduces the course, as well as some core computational tools used in data science, including directories and programming.

Week 2: Digital data

Lecture: 7 October

This week covers the fundamentals of digital data, including bits/bytes, storage and memory, character encodings, tokenisation, data types, reading/writing digital data, and version control.

Week 3: Digital security

Lecture: 14 October

This week covers core principles of digital security, including access permissions, credentials and encryption.

Week 4: Tabular data

Lecture: 21 October

This week provides an overview of the most common kind of data used in data science—tabular data—including an introduction to the principles of tidy data.

Week 5: Databases

Lecture: 28 October

This week covers the core ideas behind database systems and how to retrieve data from them using SQL.

Week 6: Reading week

No lectures or seminars.

Week 7: Visualisation

Lecture: 11 November

This week provides an introduction to the core principles of visualisation, and then demonstrates how to create visualisations and maps.

Mid-term practical test

The Week 7 seminar is the mid-term practical test (2 hours). The Week 7 seminar material is covered in the 2-hour Week 8 seminar. Check your timetable.

Week 8: APIs and remote computing

Lecture: 18 November

This week covers working with remote computers, including how web requests work, accessing data and services via APIs, and connecting to and running code on remote machines.

2-hour seminar

This week's seminar is 2 hours and covers both Week 7 and Week 8 material.

Week 9: Scraping webpages

Lecture: 25 November

This week covers the basics of scraping webpages, including an overview of the mechanics of website source code and query languages.

Week 10: Audio and images

Lecture: 2 December

This week covers core topics in audio and image processing, including principles of digitisation, ingesting AV data into Python, and basic manipulations of AV data.

Week 11: Text as data

Lecture: 9 December

This week introduces the main approaches used for converting text into numerical objects for use in data science and computing.