This course is designed to teach students analytical techniques of dealing with open government data and other (usually big) data that are related to smart governance. We will focus on two types of data: text data and geo-spatial data. Digitalized text represents an important source of data for social scientists. This is particularly true in political science, where a large amount of political information, otherwise difficult to analyze, is embodied in historical and contemporary speeches and documents that can be converted into digitalized text with increasing ease. Another source of text-based data come from online contents.

CILO-1: Explain basic statistical concepts and programming skill that are heavily used in quantitative social science research. CILO-2: Formulate their own research questions, obtain data and conduct some preliminary empirical research of their own. CILO-3: Analyze relevant data and to report the results in a professional way.