The course trains students of communication and new media to analyze and visualize numeric, text, and visual data from social media using computational social science methods, tools, and algorithms. Special emphasis will be placed on building, validating, and applying predictive models for user behaviour on social media. Through interactive learning sessions including hands-on tutorials, individual exercises, group-based projects, etc., the students are expected to become proficient to select the appropriate and efficient methods to explore, analyse, validate, and visualize 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 recommender systems, and 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%