IS 618 – Social Media Data Analysis

This course focuses on the collection and analysis of social media data for two types of societally relevant applications — for studying the impact of social media on society as well as the use of social media data to learn about society. The course will introduce technical details on the development of social media platforms, programmatic and large-scale data collection of platform data, and the analysis of this data using computational methods. Students will be introduced to data collection from a variety of platforms including Wikipedia, Youtube, and Tiktok. This course will also critically reflect on the epistemology of social media data and the validity of its analysis.

Students will learn how to collect and analyze social media data from a variety of platforms including Reddit, Wikipedia and Tiktok for the purpose of studying societally relevant question (MK1). They will learn about platform affordances of the social media platforms generating this data and its impact (MK2).
 

Methodological competence:
Students will develop quantitative data analysis skills tailored to analyzing unstructured social media data, e.g., applied text analysis and network analysis (MF3). Students will learn social media data-related concepts by executing a project (MF1).

Necessary: Knowledge of Basic Python Programming

Recommended: -