This module provides students with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively analyze social data that reflect behavior and phenomena in the context of networked information systems. Thus, the goal is to introduce the different types of data that we can collect through social networking sites and present a variety of techniques and methods for the collection, analysis and visualization of (big) data from social media. Through this course, the students will learn to collect data from social networks and the Web and apply the most current technologies and methods for understanding the behavior of the end users of social networks, in order to solve a variety of social problems. Students will also become familiar with the ethical and privacy issues of using these data and the impact that this might have on individuals and/or groups of individuals.

Module content

1. Introduction to social data and social networking sites 
2. Introduction to network science 
3. Using (big) social data to solve a variety of problems 
4. Data collection from social networks
5. Introduction to natural language processing and its application on analyzing textual data from social networks 
6. Sentiment analysis and emotion recognition from social data 
7. Social data and time consideration 
8. Social data visualization 
9. Diversity and social data  
10. Collective intelligence 
11. Social data and ethical issues
12. Guidelines for using/generating social data