SOCY 1200 — Course Materials Site

Static materials index for Introduction to Using AI to Study Society (Yale, Daniel Karell). No build step, no dependencies. Everything renders from one data array in index.html.

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Deploy

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Course materials site"
git branch -M main
git remote add origin https://github.com/USERNAME/socy1200.git
git push -u origin main

Then: Settings → Pages → Source: Deploy from a branch → main / / (root) → Save.

Live in about a minute at https://USERNAME.github.io/socy1200/.

To publish at https://USERNAME.github.io/ instead, name the repo USERNAME.github.io.

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Do not delete .nojekyll

GitHub Pages runs Jekyll by default, and Jekyll silently ignores every file and folder whose name starts with an underscore. xaringan decks knit to deckname_files/ — that's where all the CSS, JS, and remark.js live. Without .nojekyll, your decks deploy as unstyled text with no keyboard navigation, and the build log reports success.

The empty .nojekyll file in the repo root turns Jekyll off. It has no other effect.

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What's actually in here right now

Slides only — all 13 real decks (slides/week1_v3.html … week15+16_v3.html), rendered xaringan HTML plus the shared libs/, yale.css, and yale-fonts.css they depend on. Weeks are grouped into the five real units pulled from each deck's own YAML subtitle (Introduction; Prompting, with Application to Measurement; Synthetic People; AI in Experiments; AI and Society), with the midterm and final review decks (weeks 8–9 and 15–16) shown as their own entries. There's no week 9 or 13 deck, so the schedule skips them — that matches what was uploaded, not a bug.

Article PDFs are no longer hosted on the site. The readings/ folder is kept as an empty placeholder (just a .gitkeep) in case you want to reintroduce readings later — as local files, or, better for a public repo, as links to DOIs or a library permalink instead.

Assignments — a new section beneath the weekly schedule. It currently holds one handout, assignments/paper_summaries.pdf ("Short Summaries of Sorted Articles"), which you can search and filter the same way as slides.

Adding more assignments

Drop a file into assignments/, then add an entry to the ASSIGNMENTS array near the top of the <script> block:

const ASSIGNMENTS = [
  { label:"Short Summaries of Sorted Articles",
    sub:"One-line summary of every course reading, by theme",
    ext:"PDF", url:"assignments/paper_summaries.pdf" },
  { label:"Problem Set 1", sub:"Due Friday, Week 3", ext:"PDF", url:"assignments/ps1.pdf" },
];

To tie an assignment to one specific week's schedule entry instead of the general Assignments list, add it to that week's materials array with type:"assignment" (same pattern as the reading example below).

Re-adding readings later

To attach a reading to a specific week, add it to that week's materials array:

{ n:7, dates:"Week 7", title:"Limitations and Potential Solutions", materials:[
  {type:"slides",  label:"Week 7 — Limitations and Potential Solutions",
   sub:"Unit 3: Synthetic People", ext:"HTML", url:"slides/week7_v3.html"},
  {type:"reading", label:"Argyle (2023) — Out of one, many: using language models to simulate human samples",
   sub:"Political Analysis", ext:"PDF", url:"readings/argyle_simulate_2023.pdf"},
]},

type must be slides or reading to pick up existing badge styling (or assignment, data, code — the CSS for those is still in the stylesheet if you add problem sets or datasets later). CURRENT_WEEK above the UNITS array controls the amber "This week" highlight; set it to 0 over breaks.

Keep every path relative. A project page is served from /socy1200/, so a leading slash (/slides/week07.html) resolves to USERNAME.github.io/slides/... and 404s.

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Still to fill in

• Five nav links marked data-placeholder (Syllabus, Canvas, Ed Discussion, and the four "→" links in the Logistics cards). They currently no-op on click. Add real hrefs and delete the data-placeholder attribute.
• The one remaining url:"#" — week 13's Salganik chapter, which links out to an external site rather than a file you host.
• Week topics, dates, and readings are plausible placeholders, not your actual syllabus.

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If you add readings back

Same caveat as before: a GitHub Pages site is public and indexed, which is a different kind of exposure than posting a PDF behind Canvas authentication — publishers do issue takedowns over exactly that. If you reintroduce paywalled articles, the low-friction move is to point reading entries at DOIs or Yale library permalinks instead of local PDFs. Yale's library staff can generate persistent proxied links that authenticate students automatically.# socy1200

socy1200