Big data analytics

The recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the interest towards the analysis of texts in social sciences. This is largely due to the development of new methods that facilitate substantively important inferences about politics and society from large text collections. This course aims to provide an introductory guide to this exciting new area of research, while also offering guidelines on how to effectively use text methods for social scientific research.

By the end of the course students will learn how - effectively use statistical methods on texts for social scientific research; - discuss the advantages, but also the limits, of each approach. Course evaluation aims to verify the expected learning outcomes in relation to these topics.