University of Copenhagen

This course provides a basic and broad introduction to the representation, analysis, and processing of sampled data. The course introduces statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, machine learning, and visualization for experimental data. Examples are taken from real-world problems, such as analysis of internet traffic, language technology, digital sound, and image processing.

This course offers an understanding of techniques in computer systems with a focus on correctness and adherence to system properties, such as modularity and atomicity, while at the same time achieving high performance. It highlights various system mechanisms, especially from distributed systems, database systems, and network systems. Topics include system abstractions and design principles; modularity with clients and services; performance; atomicity and transactions; concurrency control and recovery; reliability, fault-tolerance, and redundancy; distributed protocols for replication; and large-scale data processing. Prerequisites include basic principles of operating systems and/or databases and working knowledge of a standard programming language (Java, C#), including concurrency and communication mechanisms.
 

This course is an introduction to programming in Python, with focus on data processing and analysis. It includes basic programming concepts such as data types, conditionals, loops, functions, object oriented programming, pattern matching (regular expressions), and computational complexity. In addition, it also provides technical skills relevant to the data science pipeline such as the ability to log on to an external server, and to navigate a Unix shell. This is an introductory programming course: no prior programming experience is required. 

This course examines the complex relationship between politics and gender. It introduces various theoretical perspectives on the ways in which politics, public policy, and international relations are shaped by and contribute to gender dynamics. In particular, the course delves into the gendered and gendering nature of politically relevant phenomena such as representation, political behavior, and war and conflict. Moreover, by presenting empirical cases through a variety of methodological and analytical lenses, the course introduces a wide range of ways of carrying out feminist, gender, and intersectional studies of politics and policy. 

The planet and humankind face major current environment and development challenges, including climate change, losses of natural habitats and biodiversity, poverty, and non-sustainable food production systems. Using selected problems and cases, this course examines how social and natural sciences address the relationship between environment and development. This includes providing a well-grounded understanding of key theoretical, conceptual, and practical debates and issues; and experience with interdisciplinary approaches to research through active participation in discussions, group work, and essay writing. The course thus introduces tools and frameworks, which can be used to think and generate knowledge across disciplines. The course places particular focus on countries in the Global South and includes cases from the Global North. During the course, students write a group based essay, which along with the rest of the curriculum forms the basis for individual oral exams.

This course focuses on digital frontiers, geopolitical frontiers, and religious-health frontiers in Africa. It develops critical analytical skills for understanding and engaging with the challenges and opportunities related to the selected emerging frontiers in diverse African contexts. The course investigates various approaches to the notion of "frontier" – both theoretical and methodological – for investigating and analyzing a range of emerging empirical frontier forms and their effects. In keeping with an interdisciplinary, critical African Studies approach, it introduces ways of thinking about frontiers in their historical, spatial, political, social, cultural, economic, and technological contexts. The selected areas of focus include growing trends and new dynamics linked to widescale digitalization across the African continent; the effects within and beyond the continent of geopolitical shifts in interests, actors, encounters, and conflicts linked not least to changes from a unipolar to more multipolar world order; and changing relations, practices, and effects arising out of new encounters between religious and health spheres on the continent. Attention is also given to new epistemological/knowledge frontiers being generated on the continent.

This course offers a broad introduction and critical review of recent trends in the field of digital humanities, with particular attention paid to applications relevant for the study of premodern societies (history, archaeology, anthropology, theology, museum studies). The course is divided into four broad themes – text, image, place, and object – highlighting an extensive interdisciplinary range of evidence that both sits within students' fields of study and encourages them to create connections with parallel avenues of scholarship. Following these themes, the course introduces cutting edge tools, successful research projects, and recent scholarship that have leveraged digital advances to fundamentally reshape our understanding of the past. Simultaneously, it engages with more complex topics concerning the ethical and methodological implications of the “Digital Turn” in humanistic studies and its implication for more traditional modes of enquiry. As a whole, this course prepares students to both more substantively engage with digital methodologies and their potential for novel research in religious studies, broadly defined. The course provides hands-on experience developing fundamental skills in digital humanistic scholarship, developing a “Digital Toolbox” that allows students to both undertake digital scholarship in their own studies and to critically engage with ongoing trends and projects relevant to their own research. These tools include, but are not limited to, introductions to GIS, database development, 3D modeling, text encoding, large language models, network modeling, and semantic modeling. Special attention is paid to ongoing research at the University of Copenhagen, highlighting the fundamental skills and research objectives of the diverse research programs taking place throughout the university. The Faculty of Theology, in particular, hosts several compelling case studies for the development and implementation of digital humanities and offers a behind-the-scenes look at these methods in action.

This course covers conditional distributions based on densities, including conditioning in the Gaussian distribution; hierarchical/mixed-effects models (theoretical and practical aspects); Bayesian analyses and computations, such as prior and posterior distributions, credible intervals, MCMC sampling; and software for mixed-effects models and Bayesian computations. This is an advanced course in statistics; it is not an introductory course. Prerequisites include probability distributions with densities, linear normal models, logistic and Poisson regression, R usage. 

This course offers an understanding of life-history adaptations, their ecological context, genetic variation, and evolution. It provides a detailed perception of biological adaptation through natural and sexual selection, the different levels of selection (genes, individuals, and social groups) and the strength of these forces in shaping life-history adaptations. The course integrates ecological and evolutionary approaches. Topics include mating systems and sexual selection; decision making and the evolution of communication; life histories in animals and microbes; life history traits: genetic variation and phenotypic plasticity; mutualistic interactions and their evolutionary stability; social evolution: cooperation and conflict; and parasite-host interactions.

This course studies contemporary economic changes of city-regions by focusing on urban and regional development. Focus is on the rise of the post-industrial knowledge economy and the new economic and social geographies, the new divisions of labor and social classes, and how these are linked to urban restructuring.