POL 304: Using Data to Understand Politics and Society

class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide

.title[
# POL 304: Using Data to Understand Politics and Society
]
.subtitle[
## Introduction
]
.author[
### Olga Chyzh [www.olgachyzh.com]
]

---

## About me

- Associate Professor of Political Science, since Fall 2020

- Previously Associate Professor of Political Science and Statistics at Iowa State University (2015-2020).

- My research areas are network analysis, spatial statistics, substantive focus on non-state violent actors

- [www.olgachyzh.com], olga.chyzh@utoronto.ca

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## Outline

- Objectives, software

- Assessments

- Getting started

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## "Tall-Order" Objective

- Get introduced to a range of cutting-edge techniques for analyzing political and social data

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## Objectives

- Learn the conceptual basics behind each technique

- Understand its applications

- Apply to real data

- Breadth over depth

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## Set-up

- About 2:1 split of class between teaching:practice

- After each class, upload your R script to Quercus to get credit.

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## Assessments

- Participation, discussion of assigned readings --- 20%

- 3 assignments (20%, 20%, 30%) 
- Apply the tools learned in class to your own data.

- As we go through applications, start thinking of your own examples

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## Lectures

- Slides, assignments, and all materials are posted on the [course website](www.pol304.netlify.app)

- Start working on the assignments today!

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## What You Already Know

- Have you taken an Intro to Statistics?

- Have you used R before?
 
- For more than a year?
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## Software to Download

- [R](https://www.r-project.org/)

- [RStudio](https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/)

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## The RStudio IDE