1 Preface

The vast majority of data has been created within the last decade. In turn many fields of research are confronted with an unprecented wealth of data. The sheer amount of information but also the complexity of modern datasets continues to point a kind researcher to programming approaches who had not considered programming to process data so far. Hacking for Social Sciences aims to give a big picture overview and starting point to reach what the open source software community calls a ‘software carpentry’ level. Also, this book argues a solid software carpentry skill level is totally in reach for most researchers. And most importantly, investing is worth the effort: being able to code leverages field specific expertise and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration as source code continues to become an important communication channel.

Meet Dr. Egghead who started his quest to figure out how his assistant got a week’s work done in two hours. “Hacker’s wear hoodies, you know”, " he mumbles as he starts to think1.

  1. FWIW, Dr. Egghead was born after Colin Gillespie’s hilarious talk on Security in Academia at useR! 2019↩︎