Unlocking Social Puzzles with Data: Digital Tools for Sociologists

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

From the cultural content we consume, through apartment hunting, to dating, more and more aspects of people’s lives nowadays unfold on digital platforms. The vast quantities of data generated, together with the availability of data analysis tools and the computational resources that power them, provide social scientists with exciting opportunities to make sense of social phenomena that, previously, were often impossible to capture. This course introduces advanced undergraduates to modern methods sociologists and other social scientists use to collect and analyze data at scale, with an emphasis on the analysis of text and of spatial data. Together, we will discuss and think through recent research that applies these methods to gain insight into how social processes operate. We will gain hands-on experience with the open-source R programming language, powering much of this research. Through in-class activities, assignments, and an independent research project, we will develop skills in data collection, wrangling, and analysis using R, aiming to uncover hidden trends and answer social puzzles. Prior experience with R, specifically, is not necessary, although some statistics or programming background is required.