In recent years, a “computational turn” has taken hold of the social sciences. Digital data and novel methods which originate from the computer sciences offer important opportunities for sociology. The course starts with teaching practical skills to collect digital trace data online (web scraping, API “harvesting”). As the lion’s share of this material is in textual format, the students will subsequently learn to evaluate large text archives in an automated way through machine learning techniques. The programming of these tools is performed in R, for which basic knowledge (as taught in the methods course of the institute) is required. Students have to write an empirical paper that answers a sociologically relevant research question using at least one of the methods learned and give extensive feedback to others’ projects in class.
- Trainer/in: Felix Lennert