STV4030A – Digital Data in Political Science

Schedule, syllabus and examination date

Course content

In this course, you will learn to use modern computational tools to collect, organize, analyze, and visualize political science data in an efficient and effective manner. You will learn best practice for documenting all stages of the process, making your results fully reproducible. Moreover, you will be introduced to relevant data-protection regulation, ethical aspects concerning political data science, and the steps you need to take in order to ensure that your research is in compliance and ethically sound.

Over the course, you will learn how to search for documents online, download and merge existing datasets, scrape websites for relevant data, interact with APIs, extract text from pdfs, use OCR on historical document collections, and organize and summarize large corpuses of text.

Learning outcome

After having completed the course, the students have acquired the following knowledge, skills and general competencies:

Knowledge

You will:

  • be able to identify potential digital data-sources and develop strategies for collecting these
  • learn best practices for documenting the data-collection process
  • learn how to make your research fully reproducible
  • be aware of data-protection regulations and how to comply with it

Skills

You will:

  • master several different digital data-collection techniques
  • know how to organize and document large quantities of data
  • be able to write R-code to automate all relevant stages of the research process
  • be able to create effective visualizations of the results for your analysis
  • be able to communicate academic knowledge in writing and orally

General competencies

You will:

  • become equipped to reflect upon ethical dilemmas arising in political data science
  • be able to design digital research projects that are in compliance with data-protection regulations
  • learn how to effectively collect, manage, analyze, and visualize digitally collected data

Admission to the course

Students must be enrolled in the master programmes in Political science.

STV4021 – 澳门葡京手机版app下载sdesign i statsvitenskap and STV4022 – Anvendt statistikk for statsvitenskap?or PECOS4025 – Analytic perspectives on peace and conflict and PECOS4022 – Applied Statistics for Peace and Conflict Studies?or?equivalent.