Digital Strategies for Social Science Research

<p>This course introduces the theories and practices of digital social sciences. The course considers the respective relevance of various digital data sources (sensors, surveys, internet-based media platforms, etc.) for social scientific purposes. In hands-on computer labs, the functioning and structure of the World Wide Web and its mark-up languages are examined. Programming tools for extracting information from these structure, especially the manipulation of text and text files, are introduced. Finally, training in the use of common statistical and computational tools to explore and analyze data (descriptive statistics, dimensionality reduction, clustering) is provided, including a comparison between classic statistical methods and machine learning.</p>