Abstract
In an increasingly technology-dependent world, it is not surprising that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates are in high demand. This state of affairs, however, has made the public overlook the case that not only computing and artificial intelligence are naturally interdisciplinary, but that a huge portion of generated data comes from human–computer interactions, thus they are social in character and nature. Hence, social science practitioners should be in demand too, but this does not seem the case. One of the reasons for such a situation is that political and social science departments worldwide tend to remain in their “comfort zone” and see their disciplines quite traditionally, but by doing so they cut themselves off from many positions today. The authors believed that these conditions should and could be changed and thus in a few years created a specifically tailored course for students in Political Science. This paper examines the experience of the last year of such a program, which, after several tweaks and adjustments, is now fully operational. The results and students’ appreciation are quite remarkable. Hence the authors considered the experience was worth sharing, so that colleagues in social and political science departments may feel encouraged to follow and replicate such an example.
Highlights
The technological advancements observed over the last decade affect all aspects of our lives
This section describes our experience in teaching the class “Big Data for Social Sciences”, an optional course part of a Political Science degree (M.A. in International Relations and M.A. in Public Corporate Communication) at the University of Bologna for the academic year 2018/2019
By the end of the course all students were proficient in using Python programming language with the Jupyter Notebook environment to conduct either quantitative data analysis or text analysis, or even both, for the research paper, as demonstrated by the code included in the research projects
Summary
The technological advancements observed over the last decade affect all aspects of our lives. Thanks to the “wealth” provided by Big Data (BD), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as applied to social research, such as in the legal sector, in electoral studies, political communications or in defense, analysis is exploding. It is, in the availability and possibility of analyzing much larger quantities of data, that lies the path to better methodology in the social sciences, which is, incidentally, the only alternative for disciplines that cannot rely extensively on the experimental method
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