How many followers does the average Twitter user have? How many accounts does the average Twitter account follow? How many times has the average account tweeted? What about the median? These questions seem simple, but it is not easy to find answers to them. Twitter only discloses how many monthly active users exist, and other […]
The study of collective action can benefit greatly from big data. Collective action is the study of how large numbers of individuals engage each other to accomplish a common task; big data illuminate how large numbers of individuals engage each other over time. Yet these data have yet to show how they can improve our […]
As far as I am aware, there are no contemporary machine-coded events data if you do not want to use GDELT.* Phil Schrodt and his colleagues are working on a GDELT replacement that promises to reduce event duplication and provide better geospatial resolution. Once that project, Phoenix, goes live, it will create real-time data based on 542 […]
Working with events data has long posed a fundamental dilemma. On one hand, the events one wants to study – state-sponsored killings, battles in a war, or protests, for example – have a complex, intertwined nature that requires either detailed case studies or detailed hand-coding of the events. On the other hand, gathering such detailed […]
This page is a repository of notes of things to remember, cool posts from around the political science blogosphere, and anything else I find interesting.
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