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The rapid growth of the World Wide Web over the past two decades tremendously changed the way we share, collect, and publish data. What was once a fundamental problem for the social sciences - the scarcity and inaccessibility of observations - is quickly turning into an abundance of data.
In addition to classical forms of data collection (e.g., surveys, lab or field experiments), a variety of new possibilities to collect original data has emerged. The Internet offers non-reactive measurements of behavior and preferences of political and other actors (for example, citizens, representatives, courts, and media). The aim of the course is to provide the technical bases for web data collection methods. Furthermore, we will study state-of-the art applications from the social sciences that exploit the potential of web-based data to tackle both classical and new questions of social science. For the practial part, the course participants are expected to independently design and collect data for own empirical applications. To this end, we will use the statistial software R. Knowledge of R is an advantage but not a prerequisite. |
