The course introduces its students to a palette of social research methods based on the repurposing of a variety of data, tools and computational techniques unique to the modern web and freely available online. The panorama of digital methods being too vast and rich to be taught in a single course, this teaching aims at breadth rather than depth. It deliberately browses through a multiplicity of tools and approaches, but does not delve into any of them. It does, however, provide students with the conceptual and technical foundations necessary to independently explore the details of the methods that are most interesting to them.
The course includes a significant amount of practical work in class and out of class, in the form of a series of collective experiments with the tools and methods introduced in the course. The students work in groups of 3 or 4 to test the resources proposed by the teacher. Each group finally produces a “report in 5-10 figures” presenting the results of a little inquiry carried out with the methods of their choice. Groups are encouraged to choose a subject that interests them early in the course and to carry out their different experiments on this same subject throughout the course.
- Teacher: Lucas Dias Rodrigues Dos Santos
- Teacher: Tommaso Venturini