Human culture provides an ideal testbed for students exploring data science--because poems, stories, and songs highlight the challenges of high-dimensional unstructured data, and because they're inherently fun to explore.
For a complete syllabus, with a schedule of assignments and readings, see the syllabus on GitHub pages, or syllabus.md. This readme file is just for quick orientation and initial setup.
Most aspects of the course will run through the Moodle page; that's where you can connect to Zoom, upload assignments, and write forum posts.
But I'll also be distributing Jupyter notebooks and supporting data files. In most cases, it will be easiest to distribute those through GitHub.
So you might start by installing git. Then open a command line, cd to a directory where you want to place is417/ as a subfolder, and clone the repository by saying:
git clone https://github.com/tedunderwood/is417.git
Later, when new materials have been added to this folder, you can get the materials by navigating to the is417 folder and saying:
git pull origin main
The files will automatically be placed in appropriate folders, which makes this a lot easier than downloading things from Moodle.