300253 Regional Political Discourse in Online Spaces using Spatial Survey and Social Media Data (S) (WiSe 2022/2023)

This course focuses on how sociological research question concerning regional differences can be analyzed with a combination of survey and social media data. To achieve this, this course will use both statistical sociological methods and computational sociology methods. Computational social science or computational sociology is an approach that combines computer science and social science to use new types and sources of data to answer sociological and socio-political questions. Primary data sources for this course are a teaching dataset with regional indicators of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and regionalized Twitter data.

Students will use the statistical software R to practice and apply the discussed approaches. Students will get access to a special teaching server to access the regionalized SOEP data as well as to the computing cluster of the Faculty of Sociology, making it possible to get some valuable experience in analyzing big data in a high performance computing environment.

The seminar will be held in English. The course credit (Studienleistung) will also be in English. Examination (Prüfungsleistung/Hausarbeit i.e. term paper) can be completed in English or German. Practical knowledge in handling data is helpful (e.g., knowledge of univariate statistics, previous use of statistical software such as R, SPSS, Stata, Python or Julia), but not required. Students will use the statistical software R throughout this course, knowledge of R is therefore an advantage, but a very brief introduction will be given to show students with no prior knowledge some resources to catch up on their own.