This most recent issue of the Political Methodologist Newsletter has an excellent piece encouraging political scientist to learn and adopt Python for their analytical work (h/t colleague Thomas Zeitzoff for alerting me to it). I could not agree with this sentiment more, as I use Python for [just about] everything. As the author Holger Döring states:
Python helps with almost all of the data management tasks I need. Two applications of the language accompany my every day work: First, I use Python scripts to generate data sets from information provided at internet pages (web scraping). Second, I work with SQLite and Django to manage more complex data sets that require database operations, such as merging, virtual tables, and visualization in web pages. Both of these usages of a modern programming language have increased my productivity significantly and made data resources more easily available.
The article also contains a nice example of how Python can be used for data generation and management, which has inspired me to add BeautifulSoup to my must-have Python packages for social scientists. The package provides a quick and easy platform for scraping and ordering data from the Internet, and given that I have used it on multiple occasions it belongs among these other great tools.
Finally, the authors mentions that Java the primary language for agent-based modeling, which is certainly true in the case of Repast; however, through the PyVote project we are trying to build a viable platform for modeling political science problems in Python. Which brings me to my final thought: what other social science project are there built with Python? I would like to put together a list (similar to the must-have packages) highlighting this work, so let me know what you are working on, or projects that you know about!
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[...] science community, which has some very decent libraries for screen/web scraping – see this elaborate post on Drew Conway’s Zero Intelligence Agents blog. But, let’s face it: I am lazy. I want to spend time analysing the data, not scraping them. [...]