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Web scrapping and social network analysis in R

Description

The purpose of this course is two-fold. Maksym will cover web scraping tools in R and then Tymofii will discuss Social Network Analysis. Maksym will start with business, economic and financial applications of web scraping together with related ethical considerations. Then we will study simple tools for data collection and analysis which do not require programming skills: Excel, Power BI and OpenRefine. Finally, we will consider automated data collection in R with numerous applications. Tymofii’s part will cover basic reasoning and techniques of SNA. Graphs and social networks are omnipresent: friendship, trade, spread of Covid-19 are analyzed and visualized with graphs. This field of science is as popular as diverse in social science: communication, sociology, epidemiology, political science and computer science apply SNA. Students will learn about SNA tools and train to apply them for their own research in economics. In this course students will learn how to collect network datasets, organize it, and then apply statistical methods. We will use R for most of classes (with a few exercises in Excel and Gephi).