Quantitative Analysis for IA Practitioners

IAFF 6501

Welcome!

Professor Eric Kramon (ekramon@gwu.edu)

Office Hours: Wednesdays, 12:30-2:30, Monroe Hall office 472 (or by appointment)

Teaching Assistant

Audrey Straw (audrey.straw@gwmail.gwu.edu)

Office Hours: Thursdays, 3:30-5 (Zoom)

Data Analysis in IA


MLP's digital tools provide fine-grained data tracking and forecasting major political events across nearly 60 countries by continuously scraping and process tens of millions of articles published by more than 300 local, regional, and international news sources in more than 30 languages. This infrastructure provides up-to-date data on recent and historical trends in civic space and foreign influence and builds forecasting models that learn from historical patterns to predict how conditions are likely to change in the near future.

Data Analysis in IA


State Department

Data Analysis in IA



Program Evaluation, Impact Evaluation Tools for identifying causal impacts

Course Objectives

Overarching goal: Provide you with data analysis skills that:

  1. You can use in your IA (or other) career

  2. Provide a foundation (and possibly interest!) for more advanced courses in the future

  3. Will allow you to understand, interpret, and critically engage with the data analysis and conclusions of others.

Emphasize some of the ways that data science is used in IA

Sections of the Course

  1. Data Visualization
    • Summarizing and communicating effectively with data
  2. Statistical Inference
    • Making rigorous conclusions from data
  3. Modeling

    • For prediction and forecasting

    • For drawing causal conclusions

Skills/knowledge you will pick up along the way

  1. R coding skills (and RStudio), with focus on “tidy” approach and reproducible research

  2. Quarto (html documents, PDFs, presentations, websites, books, blogs, …)

  3. How to access and “clean” data so that you can analyze it

  4. When you hear terms like “machine learning”, you’ll have some sense of what people are talking about

How do I get an A (requirements)

  1. Weekly quizzes (20 percent)

  2. 3 Data Analysis Assignments (45 percent; 15 percent each)

  3. Final Project Preliminary Assignments

    • Abstract - what do you want to do, what is the data you will use (5 percent)
    • EDA, Preliminary data viz, + analysis plan (10)

  4. Final Project (20 percent)

Class Structure

Most classes will be divided into four parts:

  1. Lecture topic A

  2. In class coding work on topic A

  3. Lecture topic B

  4. In class coding work on topic B

Let’s get going . . .

Your first Data Visualizations

(and making sure we have R and RStudio installed and ready to roll)

Let’s get going . . .

First, you need to make sure you have R and RStudio installed on your machine.

We will come around to help if you need it

After that, work one one of the three examples

Example: Make a map!

+−
Leaflet

Example: Plotting Democracy Over Time

Example: UN Voting Trends

Before we dive in

We need to get to know R, RStudio, and Quarto…

Your Task

  • Make sure R and RStudio installed (we can help if needed)

  • Create a folder for this class somewhere on your machine.

    • Create a sub-folder called “classwork”
    • save week1-classwork.qmd in that folder

  • Open the week1-classwork.qmd file in RStudio, which has code for 3 data viz activities

    • Map making
    • Democracy Over Time
    • UN Voting patterns

  • Follow the instructions to update the code

  • Click Render to update your HTML output and examine

  • Complete as much as you can (no problem if you do not finish)

IAFF 6501 Website

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Quantitative Analysis for IA Practitioners IAFF 6501

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  • Quantitative Analysis for IA Practitioners
  • Welcome!
  • Teaching Assistant
  • Data Analysis in IA
  • Data Analysis in IA
  • Data Analysis in IA
  • Course Objectives
  • Sections of the Course
  • Skills/knowledge you will pick up along the way
  • How do I get an A (requirements)
  • Class Structure
  • Let’s get going . . .
  • Let’s get going . . .
  • Example: Make a map!
  • Example: Plotting Democracy Over Time
  • Example: UN Voting Trends
  • Before we dive in
  • Your Task
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  • o Slide Overview
  • e PDF Export Mode
  • b Toggle Chalkboard
  • c Toggle Notes Canvas
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