Course overview
Course Convenor: James Stewart (STIS/SSPS)
Course Description:
Research techniques and methods have been developed and deployed to explore ‘digital life’ since the earliest days of computing and online communication. In this course we will address the opportunities and challenges of a range of traditional and emerging digital research approaches and techniques focusing on the relevance of their applications from a user perspective. It will cover ethical, practical, legal, methodological and economic issues in practice. The students will explore practice and knowledge in the field of research on email use, forums, SMS; internet use derived data sets; use of web analytics in engaging with consumers and citizens; opportunities and challenges of clickstream data & scraping data from internet services ; use of crowdsourcing for data collection, analysis and stakeholder engagement; use of behavioural data from IT systems, such as smart meters, GPS etc; using digital games and simulations to engage decision makers, customers and citizens, and in research on behaviour; deriving indicators from and the use of open administrative data in Policy Making 2.0.
By reviewing a number of existing projects at the forefront of digital research, the student will develop skills to assess the relevance of digital research. By learning from how advanced digital research tools have been applied to inform practice in a number of different domains, the student will be able to anticipate further developments in the field. This course has three main aims: (i) to review case studies from experimental digital research projects; (ii) to provide students with knowledge about the existence of a number of data collection and analytics services developed in research environments and (iii) to provide students with tools to assess digital research approaches and findings, including issues of ethics and risk.