Workshop "Data Management for Social Scientists - From Files to Databases"

The "data revolution'' is changing the way we work with empirical data in the social sciences. Increasingly, traces of social and political interactions can be recorded digitally, leading to vast amounts of new data that become available for research. This poses new challenges for the way we organize and process research data. This course aims to provide participants with an introduction to different data management techniques. Departing from simple tools such as spreadsheets, we move on to more powerful data management software such as relational databases for tabular data. The course focuses entirely on data management, using examples from many different subfields of political science. It relies on the free R statistical package and uses material from a new course/textbook. Solid command of R is required and will not be taught as part of the course.