Studying Politics on and with Wikipedia
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, together with its sibling, the collaboratively edited knowledge base Wikidata, provides incredibly rich yet largely untapped sources for political research. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Denis Cohen and Nick Baumann offer a hands-on recap of Simon Munzert’s (Hertie School of Governance) workshop materials to show how these platforms can inform research on public attention dynamics, policies, political and other events, political elites, and parties, among other things. Continue reading
Quantitative Analysis of Political Text
How can we infer actors’ positions, substantive topics, or sentiments from (political) texts? This Methods Bites Tutorial by Julian Bernauer summarizes Denise Traber’s workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Spring 2018. Using exemplary sets of political documents (election manifestos and coalition agreements), it showcases tools of QTA for a variety of analytical objectives and demonstrates how to create, process, and analyse a text corpus through a series of hands-on applications. Continue reading
Collecting and Analyzing Twitter Data Using R
How do you access Twitter’s API, collect a stream of tweets, and analyze the retrieved data? Which potentials, challenges, and limitations for social scientific research come along with using Twitter data? This Methods Bites Tutorial by Denis Cohen, based on a workshop by Simon Kühne (Bielefeld University) in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Spring 2019, aims to tackle these questions. Continue reading
Visual Inference with R
How can we use data visualization for hypothesis testing? This question lies at the heart of this Methods Bites Tutorial by Cosima Meyer, which is based on Richard Traunmüller’s workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Fall 2017. Continue reading
Data Visualization with R
How to make the invisible visible was the starting point of Richard Traunmüller’s one-day workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Fall 2016. This Methods Bites Tutorial by Cosima Meyer provides you with some illustrative examples from Richard’s workshop. Continue reading