Increasingly, research in all disciplines, from the natural sciences to social sciences and humanities, involves big data. The availability of vast amounts of textual, audio-visual and structured data from digital sources is revolutionizing research in the humanities and social sciences. The most advanced  scholarship in these areas, currently and in the foreseeable future, relies on the use of sophisticated tools for accessing, processing, analysing and presenting this data.
In this short module, we use current Twitter™ data to allow students gain familiarity and experience with some common approaches to handling very large datasets. They use computational thinking, and the general concepts that data analysis with computers involves. They engage with a number of very common programming languages, and in small teams, execute a project that culminates in making a web page where others can access a large data set, extract relevant information from it in an automatic fashion, display it visually, and perform some simple analysis. As part of a liberal arts curriculum, this module stimulates the kind of thinking that our college hopes to engender: the use of multiple paradigms to solve problems, drawing on reasoning, logic, analysis, hypothesis-testing, and formal problem-solving methods.

Format
The first week takes place in the computer lab at University College. Morning sessions involve introduction to a topic, and supervised hands-on computing assignments, done individually, in the classroom setting. Afternoons involve a group assignment. The assignment is assessed with feedback before the following day. At the end of the first week, a diagnostic test is taken to assess how the groups should be formed for the second week, and what activities will be meaningful for all students. The second week is residential and takes place at a location close to Utrecht where all participants, including teachers, are expected to stay four nights, Monday to Thursday. There is a focus on team-forming and project work. This week will include work sessions, presentations, and evening programs related to the theme of the module.At this location, the class, divided into four groups, will work on four separate modules which, at the end of the week, will be brought together to form a webpage to accommodate all the work, and make it accessible in principle to other users.

Schedule

The course runs for 2 weeks 4-15 January 2016