Data-driven Politics

Covers advanced computational and statistical methods for collecting and modeling large-scale data on politics. Topics will include automated and computer-assisted methods for collecting, disambiguating, and merging unstructured data (web-scraping, identity resolution, and record-linkage), database management (SQL, data architecture), data-reduction techniques for measuring the political preferences for large numbers of individuals, topic models applied to political text/speech, and social network analysis for mapping relationships and identifying influential actors.