This course is intended for social science researchers and practitioners who wish to gain insight by analyzing large data sets (“big data”), teaching them the infrastructure for data manipulation and analysis, and how to use that infrastructure with statistical and programming languages.

 

The amount of data available to social scientists is increasing every year, and such large amounts of data have the potential to provide novel insights that were previously unavailable. However, as the volume of data increases, it becomes less feasible to load and process them on a personal computer. What is needed in such cases are databases for data storage and parallel processing, and distributed computing systems for data processing and computation. Learning about them is the objective of this course.

 

With regard to database systems, after learning the basic concepts, participants will learn SQL, the most widely used relational database language, and its management systems. As a more advanced topic, we will overview databases other than SQL, especially MongoDB, which is an excellent non-relational destination for storing large unstructured data (e.g. text data). For data processing and computation, students will learn how to parallelize data processing and analysis and how to use distributed computation systems, such as Apache Spark.

 

To learn these technologies, both theory and practice are very important, and thus the course will provide both lectures and labs as one set. The primary programming language will be R, as it is a language familiar to most quantitative social scientists, but given the increased importance of Python in social data science, the course will show how to use Python to do what we have learned in R, when appropriate.

 

For additional details on the course and a day-to-day schedule, please download the full-length syllabus.

 

For those who would like a primer or refresher in R or Python, we recommend taking the online workshop "Introduction to R" that takes place from 05-07 September 2023 or the online workshop “Introduction to Python” that takes place from 04-06 September 2023.