Mailing lists, or listserves, are a fascinating wealth of social scientific data that can be used to answer questions from fields as diverse as linguistics and sociology. Much of this data is publicly available through the Web. But mailing list data can also be messy and hard to work with.
This workshop introduces participants to BigBang, an open source Python toolkit for studying mailing lists. BigBang collects email data, preprocesses it into useful data structures, and provides support for analyzing it as text, time series, and social data.
BigBang uses IPython notebooks as an analysis interface. This workshop is of intermediate difficulty, intended for students with some scientific Python computing background looking to get practice with a broader range of techniques. Please bring your laptop.
