SOSGEO2920 ¨C Introduction to Digital Research Methods

Course content

An ever larger part of our time and our social and professional lives takes place on the internet. This goes for our love lifes, for our interaction with friends and acquaintances, and for our participation in democratic and public debate; it goes for our relation to the politicians we elect, our use of news media and our search for knowledge and information; just as it goes for our interests in fashion hobbies or culture.

Due to this increasing digitalization of social life, these communicative exchanges and interaction patterns are often retrievable and open to analysis with digital means. This opens up new social scientific and empirical possibilities, which a new field of "digital methods" seeks to exploit. This new field of digital methods - possessing its own degree of strengths and weaknesses - has begun to take shape between traditional quantitative and qualitative conceptions of method.

This course provides a basic introduction to the field of digital methods for undergraduate students. It requires no coding or programming skills or prior experience with digital research tools, and no experience with statistics. It centers on hands-on exercises and mini-projects to explore the potential utility and versatility of a broad range of analytical tools. The course teaches students to extract text and interaction data from the Internet, including important social media platforms, and to visualise and analyse these data in novel ways and with novel means. The course will considerably augment the student¡¯s range of means to access and analyse empirical material more generally: it is meant to generate competences which can be of use to complement and nuance virtually any social scientific investigation (in tandem, or not, with traditional methods). The course also touches upon more theoretical aspects and discussions associated with digital sociology and the use of digital methods, including theories about how (social) media frames and informs interaction, about the relationship between the digital and the social, and about the ethical implications and problems of digital research. Yet, it focuses on the development of technical skills and upon gaining familiarity with the software tools introduced during the course.

Enrolled students should prepare for possible frustrations regarding the functioning of the software tools used in the course. The fast-changing landscape of the Internet and the changing strategies of major social media platforms create a number of difficulties.

IMPORTANT! All students need to commit to working in groups of 3-5 during the semester. If you are not prepared to engage in group work, this course is not for you. These groups will be formed by the instructors during the first month of the course, and barring exceptional circumstances, they will remain stable throughout the course. Importantly, students will take their final exam in these groups (see below).

The course is open for both students of siciology and human geography.

Learning outcome

Learning Objectives

At the end of the course, students will

• Have experience with (freely accessible) software tools permitting extraction and analysis of interaction data and text from internet sites and important social media platforms
• Have