The course trains students of communication and new media to collect and process content data from social media using computational social science methods, tools, and algorithms. Special emphasis will be placed on web sampling, crawling, storage, and text processing based on a combination of tailor-made tools and open source resources. Through interactive learning sessions including in-class tutorials, individual exercises, group-based projects, etc., the students are expected to become proficient to collect big data from social media for a variety of basic and applied research purposes such as theory-driven studies, data-driven reporting, news visualization, social media user recommendation systems, etc. Issues of policy and research ethics such as privacy protection, data integrity, and open access will also be explored along with technical challenges and solutions.

Continuous Assessment: 100%