Working with Big Data

Full course description

This course offers an extensive and systematic introduction to the tools and analytical methods analysts use when analysing big data and specifically social media data. During the course, you will develop both the technical-computational skills that are in high demand across a range of research organisations and industries, as well as the necessary critical skills in computational thinking, algorithm design, big data fundamentals, and data-driven analysis. You will have plenty of opportunities to apply and explore your new learning through case studies. During this course we will go through identifying data sources and collecting/scraping social media data to suit our research purposes, pre-processing the data and transforming it from text to quantitative data, which lends itself to statistical analysis. You will also learn how to analyse these data by employing statistical tools and automatic content analytical methods, to address meaningful, theoretically informed, empirical research questions and extracting meaningful insights, patterns, trends and correlations from Big Data. These skills are in high demand in civil service agencies, research communities and the labour market, as a tool that can help reach better policy and business decisions.