Syllabus 2019-20

Digital switch

The first five weeks of this Corona edition were similar to the 2018 sessions, the rest of the semester consisted of weekly online meetings per group, step by step development of the group projects and individual assignments.

Weekly planning

  1. Intro | Course goals | Organisation | Technical preparation 20200211
    • "math anxiety"
    • the data pipeline
    • definitions of popular culture & popular culture media
    • assignment: install OpenRefine
  2. Acquiring datasets 20200218
    • structured and unstructured data
    • concept: webscraping (examples with Outwit Hub)
    • intro OpenRefine functionality
    • assigment: get used to OpenRefine navigation, explore datasets: practice filters and facets
  3. Cleaning Data 20200225
    • what is "cleaning"?
    • assignments:
      • find and paraphrase the quantitative research questions in a set of articles on Japanese popular culture
      • OpenRefine: analyse, edit and fix cells
  4. Data analysis 20200303
    • introduction textanalysis and textmining
      • mailgloss project
      • NLTK Python library
      • MeCab
      • Nvivo
    • example network analysis
    • assignments:
      • data cleaning exercise
      • find solutions with GREL
      • explore the Aozora Bunko repository
  5. DataViz 20200310
    • visualisation: what, why, how
    • D3.js
    • Tableau
  6. Set-up groupwork 20200324
    • research howto (reference materials)
    • assignments
      • digest tableau tutorial
      • scraping exercise with OpenRefine
      • emulate D3.js scripts I
  7. Research week 1 20200331
    • character encoding and conversion (reference materials)
    • assignments
      • emulate D3.js scripts II
      • exercise textanalysis/OpenRefine with Aozora Bunko repo
  8. Research week 2 20200421
    • assignments
      • reconciliation with OpenRefine: go through documentation
      • wrap up webscraping and text analysis
  9. Research week 3 20200428
  10. Production week 1 20200505
    • assignment: exercise reconciliation with OpenRefine
  11. Production week 2 20200512
  12. Round-up & Feedback 20200519

Changes in approach

Compared to 2018-19

  1. Hands-on software usage, not only introduction toolkit
  2. All 'theory' at the front of the session series, the rest research and production
  3. Prepare more cheatsheets and other reference materials
  4. Provide relevant datasets to play with