Cape Town Summer School. Encounters with big data: An introduction to using big data in the social sciences
We are delighted to announce our first intensive summer school in the area of big data in the social sciences.In the first week of February 2017 staff from the UK Data Service will be visiting their data centre partners, DataFirst, at the University of Cape Town to run a 5-day intensive course which we have coined, ’Encounters with big data: an introduction to using big data in the social sciences’. The course, hosted in central Cape Town, will introduce key concepts and discussions around using big data in the social sciences, and introduce attendees to the Hadoop data environment, an open source data platform for big data. Over the 5 days there will be a mixture of instruction, technical demos and plenty of hands-on work through exercises, plus a small group project. This course will focus on quantitative data and will not cover in any detail text, social media, audio or other non-numeric forms of data.This introductory level course is aimed at experienced data users, statisticians, researchers, lecturers or data managers who have experience using or handling quantitative research data in the social sciences, running commands in a statistics package like Stata, R or SPSS, and have a good understanding of statistical methodology and concepts like standard error and standard deviation. The course also features as a specialist follow-on course for students already familiar with social science who attended the CoData-RDA first School of Research Data Science, which took place this year on 1-12 August.This workshop is being supported by the two research councils in the UK and South Africa, and we are fortunate to be able to offer the summer school at no cost. A returnable deposit of 500 RAND will be required to confirm attendance. Please note that only those residing and working or studying in South Africa are eligible to apply and attend, and there are a number of prerequisites for the course which will need to be met. A limited number of scholarships for travel and accommodation are available for those who will not be supported by their own organisation.Please see our events page for more details: https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/news-and-events/eventsitem/?id=4791***Please pass onto any colleagues in South Africa***