16. Big Data and social research – 2 years on
Next month will be two years since my first post. Back then examples of big data in social research and evaluation were more limited and the courses on offer were not so specialised for a social research audience. Things are different today. 1) A wider range of social research methods courses connected to big data, […]
12. Back to reading, Bit by Bit
I paused efforts on an introductory course on machine learning and statistical inference after finding Professor Matthew J. Salganik’s draft book, Bit by Bit: social research in the digital age, which has been available for open peer review since summer 2016 (click on the book title to access it, and here to learn about the […]
7. A first attempt at social media analytics
My first, uninformed answer to the question what is big data? was ‘stuff off social media’. In particular, social media familiar to me and that is accessible – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Much of the content on Facebook or Instagram is shared ‘privately’ between users that are connected to each other in a closed network. Twitter, being a […]
1. Big data and social research
What is big data? What does it mean for the work I do? What is the role for big data in evaluation? What skills or and experience do I need to develop? As you can probably tell from the questions, I am not a programmer, statistician or data scientist. I have quite a bit of experience analysing data […]