Environment/Sustainability

This course introduces theories and methods used for the analysis of political networks. Political networks describe how political actors - such as participants of the policy process - form and maintain relationships, and the analysis of political networks can help us to understand how these relationships influence political or policy outcomes. Network concepts are increasingly prevalent across a wide range of social science disciplines, and are often used as a tool to study complex phenomenon such as cooperation, diffusion of innovation, and social capital. This course will introduce students to major research questions in the study of networks, as well as their applicability to understand real-world problems in public policy and political science. Students will learn, through hands-on training in R, how to manage network data and perform essential descriptive and inferential analyses on these data.

Students will learn from experts from projects that have developed widely adopted foundational Cyberinfrastrcutrue resources, followed by hands-on laboratory exercises focused around those resources. Students will use these resources and gain practical experience from laboratory exercises for a final project using a data set and meeting requirements provided by domain scientists. Students will be provided access to computer resources at: UA campus clusters, iPlant Collaborative and at NSF XSEDE. Students will also learn to write a proposal for obtaining future allocation to large scale national resources through XSEDE. Graduate-level requirements include reading a paper related to cyberinfrastructure, present it to the class, and lead a discussion on the paper.

Quantitative methods in political science and policy research are changing rapidly. The rise of the internet has brought in new sources of text, network, geographical, image, video, and other data. Meanwhile, computing storage and processing capabilities continue to expand, while data and code sharing norms have made it so that anyone with a computer and internet connection can have access to a growing set of tools and methods for modeling and interpreting patterns. This course focuses on the extraordinary work that is emerging in politics and policy as a result of these recent advances, with a broad set of applications ranging from health and defense to environmental and agricultural policy. The course highlights current trends, challenges, and new directions for political and policy researchers in academia, government, and the private sector, focusing on how these new data sources and methodologies are being used to solve problems in social science and public policy.