Computers

• Software I currently use most in research and teaching include Mathematica and Stata for computation in the narrow sense; Gif Construction Set and one or another pixel editor for image manipulation; Vedit, TeX, and Acrobat for document editing, formatting, and output to printer or web.

• I also collect information and artifacts about how things currently done with computers used to be done, in pre- and early-computer eras. Tools and techniques of interest include those for textual and pictorial (as well as numerical) material. See a separate web page regarding my collection.

• The social impact of widespread computerization is a topic I consider important enough that I once developed a course on it (see below).
  Someday I may make another try along those lines, this time with an explicit social history flavor to it, and drawing on artifacts in my collection as well as library materials. But that isn't high priority in the near future.

Courses:

All my teaching uses computers at some level, from posting syllabi on my web site, to actually conducting a course with each student seated at a workstation linked to the internet, with my monitor projected onto a wall.

The following courses actually have the word "computer" or something closely related ("web") in their titles:

• Soc. 113. Statistical and Computer Methods in Social Research.

• Soc. 281/197e. Mathematical Sociology Seminar. (Spring 1997 emphasis on problems in mathematical sociology Web publishing.)

• Soc. 285e/197d. Computers and Modeling. (Spring 2000 seminar using Mathematica in modeling of marriage formation and other types of pairing phenomena.)

• Former Soc. 9. Computers and Social Change. This course, which I developed in the mid-1980s and offered with a lower division (freshman-sophomore) course number, was a disaster, and was discontinued. I still think the topic is interesting and important, but was unable to convince students; insofar as I understand it, they wanted instruction on the use of computers, not the social impact of computers.

To be added:

• link to SSC, CLICC, for computer labs and classrooms
• information on related courses taught by others, including Program in Computing (PIC), and short courses from OAC, library, etc.
• information on Concentration in Computing
• link to UCLA Computer Science Department
• information on the Sociology and Computers section of the American Sociological Association.