About the research
Teaching
It is only in the past decade that ‘big data’ from sources like social media, digital sensors, financial and administrative transactions have become available as data commodities for the social scientist. While data science courses have been around for some time, there is still relatively few introductory events aimed at social scientists The panacea of big data has led to a focus on realising the power of analytics rather than on data quality. Yet researchers need to appreciate the structure, provenance and trustworthiness of data, and its ethical entitlements, as well as the computational methods and tools used to analyse the data. Data services like ours are well placed to roll out training across the whole of the ‘big data’ life cycle.