SPAN 4350.01, Computational Culture in Spanish
Primavera 2015: MWF 2:00 - 2:50 in NH 4

Prof. Harry Howard

(504) 862-3417 (voice mail 24 hours a day)
Horas de consulta: MTW 3-4 & por cita previa en Newcomb Hall 322-D

Course language: As in almost all of the courses offered with the SPAN prefix, this one is taught in Spanish.

Overview: Computational Culture in Spanish teaches you how to use digital Spanish text to learn about Spanish culture. Hopefully you'll finish the semester with some practical knowledge about solving cultural problems, such as techniques for identifying the author of a text from the statistics of the words that he or she uses or identifying the mood of a population by what it discusses on Twitter. You will also become familiar with a computer programming language called Python, which is easy to learn and makes doing many tasks with digital text rather simple.

Objectives:

• You will learn some Spanish: we will explore several topics in Spanish grammar from the perspective of how to get a computer to analyze them, plus your will learn the technical vocabulary of linguistics, of computer programming, and of natural language processing.
• You will learn some linguistics: analyzing a word into its morphemes, categorization of a word according to its part of speech, analysis of a sentence into phrases, relations between words and phrases in a text.
• You will learn some algorithms: part-of-speech tagging, parsing, building feature-based grammars, text classification, information extraction.
• You will learn some statistics: frequency distribution, Bayesian inference, maximum entropy.
• You will learn about how many social media work, from a technical perspective.
• You will learn some computer programming: how to do all this in Python.

Outcomes: For you to demonstrate your attainment of these objectives, you will perform the following tasks:

• Do daily homework assignments. This is a hands-on course, in which you actually learn how to do something. Learning how to do something takes practice, though. The homework will not be graded.
• Take a quiz or turn in a project almost every week, on Mondays. [11-1 * 7.5% = 75%]
  • No quiz/project can be accepted late, though I will drop the lowest grade.
  • Even though these look like a lot of small grades, missing just one lowers your final grade almost an entire letter, as an unfortunate few have found out the hard way.
  • If you know ahead of time that you will miss a quiz/project, send me an e-mail beforehand, and I will excuse you with no penalty. Beforehand does not mean the morning that the quiz/project is due, however.
• Present a final project to the class on the final exam day and turn in a written report of your project within two days. [25%]
  • You final project will be a Python program to solve some problem of interest to you in Spanish.
  • This may be a group effort, but the entire group will receive the same grade.
• Note that there is no credit for class participation, though I will raise a Y+ to an X– if your class participation is worthy of recognition.
  • There is no class participation grade because:
    • I will pod-cast my lectures (record them as mp3 files and make them available on this page, in the 'mp3' column in the Schedule of Assignments below), and
    • I will also make my PowerPoint presentations available on this page, in the 'ppt' column in the Schedule of Assignments below.
  • So all of the information that is imparted in class is available to you outside of class. Therefore I don't care whether you show up for class or not, but if you do not, you do not get to ask me questions or brainstorm with your fellow students. And that is how most people really learn something. And you will miss out on all the fun.

Code of Academic Integrity

“The integrity of Newcomb-Tulane College is based on the absolute honesty of the entire community in all academic endeavors. As part of the Tulane University community, students have certain responsibilities regarding work that forms the basis for the evaluation of their academic achievement. Students are expected to be familiar with these responsibilities at all times. No member of the university community should tolerate any form of academic dishonesty, because the scholarly community of the university depends on the willingness of both instructors and students to uphold the Code of Academic Conduct. When a violation of the Code of Academic Conduct is observed it is the duty of every member of the academic community who has evidence of the violation to take action. Students should take steps to uphold the code by reporting any suspected offense to the instructor or the associate dean of the college. Students should under no circumstances tolerate any form of academic dishonesty.” For further information, point your browser at http://college.tulane.edu/honorcode.htm. Violations of the Code of Academic Integrity will not be tolerated in this class. I will rigorously investigate and pursue any such transgression.

Students with disabilities who need academic accommodation should:

• Contact and register with the Office of Disability Services (ODS). For more information, visit the ODS website at http://erc.tulane.edu/disability/.
• Bring official notice to me from the ODS indicating that you need academic accommodation. This should be done before the first quiz/project.

Programa de la primavera de 2015
http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/CompCultES/

Date	Day		Topic	Assignment	P	ppt	mp3
Ene 12 (M)	1		Presentación del curso	Instalación de Python de Anaconda
14 (W)	2		Las cadenas 1	¿Qué es?, Las cadenas 1		--
16 (F)	3		Las cadenas 2			--	--
19 (M)			Festivo MLK
21 (W)	4		Las cadenas 3			--
23 (F)	5		Las cadenas 4			--
26 (M)	6		Las expresiones regulares 1		P1	--
28 (W)	7		Las expresiones regulares 2
30 (F)	8		Las expresiones regulares 3
Feb 2 (M)	9		Las expresiones regulares 4		P2
4 (W)	10		UNICODE
6 (F)	11		Las listas 1
9 (M)	12		Las listas 2 y los archivos en línea 1		P3
11 (W)	13		Los archivos en línea 2
13 (F)	14		--			--	--
16 (M)			LUNDI GRAS
18 (W)	15		El control 1
20 (F)	16		El control 2
23 (M)	17		El control 3		P4
25 (W)	18		Scripts y funciones
27 (F)	19		Páginas web y blogs 1
Mar 2 (M)	20		Los archivos en línea 2		P5
4 (W)	21		Los archivos en línea 3
6 (F)	22		La estadística de texto 1
9 (M)	23		La estadística de texto 2		P6
11 (W)	24		La estadística de texto 3
13 (F)	25		La estadística de texto 4
16 (M)	26		La estadística de texto 5		P7
18 (W)	27		La estadística de texto 6
20 (F)	28		Tuiter 1
23 (M)	29		Tuiter 2		P8
25 (W)	30		Tuiter 3
27 (F)	31
30 (M)			DESCANSO DE LA PRIMAVERA
Abr 1 (W)			DESCANSO DE LA PRIMAVERA
3 (F)			DESCANSO DE LA PRIMAVERA
6 (M)	32		Páginas web y blogs 2		P9
8 (W)	33		YouTube
10 (F)	34		YouTube 2
13 (M)	35		Facebook		P10
15 (W)	36		Facebook 2
17 (F)	37		Cultura computacional
20 (M)	38		Cultura computacional		P11
22 (W)	39		Cultura computacional
24 (F)	40		Cultura computacional
27 (M)	41		Presentaciones
May 1 (F)	--		DIA DEL EXAMEN FINAL 10-12	Presentación de proyectos a la clase

Additional Readings

• Michel, J.-B. et al. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014), 176-182.
• López, F. (2011). Donde se muestran algunos resultados de atribución de autor en torno a la obra cervantina. Revista Colombiana de Estadística, 34(1).

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