MIT298-0: Big Data & Social Media Analytics

Course Description

Rooted in a critical epistemology that explores the interrogation of power through digitality, this course introduces students to essential tools and methods for analyzing social media and other media data, with a focus on network analysis, data visualizations, and AI-assisted analysis. Students will learn to use Gephi for network analysis, Tableau for creating compelling visualizations, Voyant Tools for applied analysis of textual corpora, and AI-assisted content analysis, as well as basic techniques for preparing and cleaning data. By the end of the course, students will be able to extract, analyze, and visualize data from various sources including X, newspapers, and other texts. 

Reflection

Having previously taken Professor Jones’ course AI, Deepfakes and Disinformation, I was curious to see what he was offering in this course, since I was beginning to develop a genuine interest in social media analytics in the course of working towards completing my capstone, which also focused on social media. This course was just the right kind that I needed to understand and implement the technical side of my knowledge of social media and big data operations due to its focus on developing skills in various data visualization softwares. 

The first of these, Gephi, was a relatively simple yet sophisticated platform that could be used to create visualizations to assist with network analysis. Tableau was a step up from Gephi, with a slightly more intricate and demanding structure that likewise produced detailed visualizations per the creator’s objectives, making it ideal for creating a variety of graphs and charts with large amounts of data. Voyant Tools proved to be yet another software that was easy to work with and reliable in its function of creating a range of visualizations suited for a diverse audience. 

This course has certainly delivered on helping me develop my critical thinking skills to evaluate the effectiveness of various data analysis and visualization techniques in different contexts, such as media, social networks, and text corpora in interrogating power and inequality, particularly since I now know how to arrive at such analyses and visualizations myself.

On the whole, this course has been an effective step towards the completion of my certificate. At the same time, my active participation in the course has imparted to me a one-of-a-kind knowledge - especially where applying digital analytical tools are concerned - with regards to social media and techniques to understand it in an era when it is growing and affecting us in ways that we are unable to control.