Digital platforms and devices have become part of our daily lives, enabling us to collect data about human behavior on a scale unimaginable before. The analysis of social data offers new approaches to questions about human behavior and promises insights for business and politics. However, social data analysis is fraught withanalytical pitfalls. The downside of large, rich datasets is information overload, complicating the search for a viable approach. Analyzing data collected for different purposes in complex environments also easily leads to false conclusions. This course tries to equip students with basic skills for diving in social data. In a series of lectures, paper discussions, and hands-on project exercises, we will transform, describe, and make inferences about numeric, textual, and relational social data. We will also consider the ethics of social data analysis and its opportunities for social science more generally.