Labs
For weeks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 we will have a lab session where students can drop in and work together on a problem individually or in groups. I will select a problem that will allow you to practice important techniques. The labs are optional, but I strongly recommend that you participate. Getting your hands dirty with really problems is a great way to learn.
I encourage you to work on these problems in R, and I will not personally be able to support other languages. But, if there are students who want to work on these problems in another language, they are welcome to support each other.
These problems will assume a level of math, statistics, and coding equivalent to Soc 500 and Soc 504 (the required statistics sequence for our first year Ph.D. students).
Lab related to Big data, Week 2
Activity 8 from Chapter 2 of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
To do this activity you should read this paper before coming to lab:
- Penney. 2016. Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use. Berkeley Technology Law Journal.
Lab related to Surveys, Week 3
Activity 3 from Chapter 3 of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
To do this activity you should read this paper before coming to lab:
- Goel et al. 2016. Non-Representative Surveys: Fast, Cheap, and Mostly Accurate. Working paper. Watch David Rothschild discuss this paper (optional).
Note that we are unlikely to finish this activity in one lab. So we can set up the data collection one week, and do the analysis next week.
Lab related to Experiments, Week 4
Activity 21 or 22 from Chapter 4 of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
To do this activity you should read this paper before coming to lab:
- Lewis are Rao. 2015. The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising. The Quarterly Journal of Economics and watch Justin Rao discuss an early version of this paper (optional).
Lab related to Mass collaboration, Week 5
Activity 1 from Chapter 5 of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
To do this activity you should read this paper before coming to lab:
- Benoit et al. 2015. Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data. American Political Science Review. .
Note that we are unlikely to finish this activity in one lab. So we can set up the data collection one week, and do the analysis next week.
Wrap-up, Week 6
Finish analyzing data and writing up results.
