Course Description

Instructor: Prof. Ji Ma
Time: Thursday, 2–5pm, 2023 fall
Location: SRH 3.316 (in-person only).
Office hour: Fridays, 2-4pm (pls book to avoid conflict with others).

This class equips you with powerful data management skills. You will learn how to manage and work with big, complex, and unstructured datasets in the public and nonprofit sectors. You are expected to learn the following skills and respond to “big questions” that have social importance: 1) Understand the structure of data and how to work with big and complex datasets; 2) Understand the workflows of acquiring and managing data; 3) Able to conduct data-intensive and replicable social science research.

Programming is not a prerequisite of this class, and you will have a chance to develop your own programming skill set. I primarily uses Python for data work and Stata for statistical analysis, but you are welcome to use any programming language or software as long as you can complete the assignments.

Course roadmap

Grading

See a list of Assignments

A >= 98%, A- >= 90
B+ >= 87%, B >= 83%, B- >= 80%
C+ >= 77%, C >= 73%, C- >= 70%
D+ >= 67%, D >= 63%, D- >= 60%

Resources

Past presentations: 2019 Spring 2020 Spring 2021 Spring

Copyright for Open Education

This syllabus and all course content created by the instructor, TA, and students are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.