komex: Applied Data Management for Social Scientists

Participants of this five-day in-person introduction to applied data management gain systematic theoretical insight and learn from best practices to advance their own projects. They learn how to address challenges to organizing, storing, and processing data.

What Is This Course About?
Since the “data revolution”, new challenges to organizing, storing, and processing data have emerged. Focusing entirely on data management, participants of this five-day in-person course gain systematic theoretical insight and learn from best practices to advance their own projects. Participants gain hands-on experience in R and heuristics to select efficient tools for their own projects—from spreadsheets, file-based data storage, and basic functions of the R statistical toolkit to relational databases and approaches for spatial, text, and network data based on participants’ demands.

Timetable – 4h / day

•         09:00-10:30h
•         10:45-12:15h
•         13:30-14:30h

Learning Goals
After this course you will:

• Have an overview of the most important methods of data management in the social sciences.
• Be aware of critical junctures, potential pitfalls and best practices in data management.
• Implement data management based on a broad toolkit including implementations in R.
• Know basic features of relational databases.
• Make informed choices about data management in your own research projects.

Who are Your Instructors?
Anna-Lena Hönig is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality“ and the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Her research examines autocracies with a focus on political protest, repression, and cooperation. In her research and teaching, she focuses on social network analysis, survey experiments, and causal inference. She is a co-founder of the annual Workshop on Conflict Dynamics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Twitter: @annalenahoenig

Eda Keremoglu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz and a principal investigator at the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality“. Taking a comparative approach, her research focuses on autocracies. Eda applies computational, quantitative methods to examine contention, repression and the political role of the Internet in these regimes.
Twitter: @eda_keremoglu