In collaboration with the Association of Politics and Life Sciences and the LACPOP (UQÀM), the Centrer for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to present the workshop:
Politics, Physiology, and Cognition: Advances in Theory and Method
Where and when: July 25 – 27, 10am to 5pm. President Kennedy Room PK1140, UQÀM (201 Avenue du Président-Kennedy, Montréal, QC H2X 3Y7).
Workshop
- Thursday July 25 from 10am to 3:30pm, and Friday July 26 from 9am to 7:30pm.
- Workshop program
- Please click here to register
Conference
- Saturday July 27 from 10am to 5pm.
- Conference program
- Please click here to register
About: Political scientists have increasingly been drawing on a broader, interdisciplinary literature on cognition, psychology and physiology. A growing body of literature demonstrates a connection between physiological processes such as genetics, neurophysiology, cognition and political attitudes. This research suggests that individual ideological development depends on a complex interaction between social and biological factors. Yet, the results emerging from this budding field have yet to be fully integrated into our understanding of public opinion: how and why do individuals develop different political attitudes.
This workshop assembles a cross disciplinary, international group of leading experts from communications, economics, philosophy, political science, neuroscience, and sociology to address pressing questions on the relationship between human cognition, physiology, and the development of political attitudes.
This workshop also aims to provide young scholars, especially in political science, with training in the use of cognitive and physiological methods. We have arranged for a group of experts to conduct a series of hands on methodology demonstrations, focusing on new technologies applicable to political science including the measurement of: implicit cognitive processing; skin conductance, and emotional facial expressions.
If you have any questions, please contact Jordan Mansell at jordan.mansell@linacre.ox.ac.uk.
The CSDC is happy to present:
2019 Computing and Math Summer Camp:
Three (p)refresher workshops for graduate students
When: August 20 to 23, August 26 to 29, and August 30
Hosts: Aaron Erlich (Political Science), Peter McMahan, Thomas Soehl (Sociology)
About: Quantitative approaches comprise a large and growing part of social science and humanities research. It is increasingly difficult to take graduate level courses and read important papers in your field without an understanding of statistical inference, programming, and mathematical models. McGill offers a wide range of courses to give you competency in these areas, but sometimes graduate students feel inadequately prepared to take advantage of these resources.
To help you make the most of your studies, the Faculty of Arts in collaboration with the departments of Political Science and Sociology, the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, the Centre for Social and Cultural Data Science (CSCDS), the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) and the Geographic Information Centre (GIC), offer three workshops before the beginning of fall term. The workshops assume no background!
We encourage you to take all of the workshops, particularly if you are an incoming graduate student, but you can also register for only one workshop. Detailed outlines of each syllabus will be available later in the summer.
Prerequisites:
NONE! If you never heard of these topics you should not be scared off. In fact, you are the perfect student for this workshop. The goal is to give you a basic overview of the material as well as the resources and the confidence to learn more. If you already have some background, but have not used this material recently, these workshops will also be useful.
Registration:
The workshops are free to attend for all McGill students and members of the CSDC. In fact, budget permitting, we will provide free coffee and bagels. If demand exceeds capacity, we will give preference to incoming graduate students. We will start forming the courses in early August. To be guaranteed consideration register before July 31 at this link: https://forms.gle/tGj2MwkVbxkyy28r5
Format and Policies:
The workshops will run all day from 9am to 4pm with a one-hour lunch break. These workshops are not for credit and there are no exams. Nobody but you will know how well you did. Still, taking the workshop will require a commitment. The sessions will involve a mix of lecture and hands-on practice. Just like any skill, you can’t learn math and computing by just watching. You have to do it to learn it.
We expect you attend the entire sessions, do any readings we assign and participate in all aspects. If you register but your plans change, that’s fine but we expect that you inform us; simply not showing up you will waste our efforts and resources.
For any questions e-mail: Meghan Keenan at meghan.keenan@mcgill.ca
Program:
- Workshop I: Review of basic mathematical and statistical concepts.
Instructor: TBD [4 days – Tuesday August 20 to Friday, August 23]
This workshop will (re-) introduce you to notation commonly used in statistics, cover functions, basic calculus, probability theory, and linear algebra.
Day 1 (Optional): Review of basic Algebra, functions, notation (Greek letters)
Day 2: Basic Probability and statistical concepts
Day 3: Calculus: Functions, derivatives, integrals
Day 4 (half day): Linear Algebra: Vectors, matrices, matrix multiplication - Workshop II: Introduction to statistical computing in R, and typesetting languages
Instructor: Tim Elrick [4 days – Monday, August 26 to Thursday, August 29]
This workshop will introduce you to R, a common statistical programming language used across many courses at McGill as well as rmarkdown (typesetting language useful for producing documents that contain mathematical content and code). These are very useful and powerful tools but they have somewhat of a steep learning curve. So the goal of this part of the workshop is to get you up a good part of that learning curve.
Day 1: Introduction to R and working with data in R
Day 2: Cleaning data, types of variables and lists, dealing with missing data
Day 3: Descriptive Statistics, creating graphs using ggplot2
Day 4: Typesetting using R markdown, R-studio Add-Ins - Workshop III: Introduction to replicable research using version control.
Instructor: Aengus Bridgman [1 day – Friday, August 30]
This workshop will introduce you to Git and Github to manage your research projects. Git and Github allow for easy collaboration. They also allow you to generate replicable files necessary for publication in many journals.
