vaidasmo / new-forms-of-data

Materials and information relating to the New Forms of Data training series

New Forms of Data

Training Series

The UK Data Service is pleased to release open learning materials from its training series: New Forms of Data for Social Science Research. Vast swathes of our social interactions and personal behaviours are conducted online and/or captured digitally. Our use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram generates astounding amounts of data, much of which is available from these platforms if you have the right programming skills. Snapshots of our daily lives are routinely captured and aggreagted into large, rich administrative datasets. Websites can be scraped and marshalled into statistically-usable datasets, and documents aggregated into large corpora of text information that can be mined for interesting patterns (e.g., through sentiment analysis). Thus, computational methods for collecting, processing and analysing new forms of data are an increasingly important component of a social scientist’s toolkit.

Materials

We have provided sample code, webinar recordings and slides, reading lists, FAQs and more for each of the topics covered under the New Forms of Data training series:

• Agent-based Modelling
• Web-scraping for Social Science Research
• Programming for Social Science Research
• Being a Computational Social Scientist
• Text Mining [Coming soon]
• Social media/network Data [Coming soon]

We have also written guidance for installing Python and other packages on your machine: [Instructions]

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to UKRI through the Economic and Social Research Council for their generous funding of this training series.

Further Information

• To keep up to date with upcoming and past training events: [Events]
• To get in contact with feedback, ideas or to seek assistance: [Help]

Thank you and good luck on your journey exploring new forms of data!

Dr Julia Kasmire and Dr Diarmuid McDonnell
UK Data Service
University of Manchester