Week 4) Web Data in Research Projects

Learning goals

By the end of this week, you should understand:

  • why web data can provide valuable marketing or consumer insights;
  • how a research question, a data source, and a data-collection method need to fit together; and
  • which methodological, technical, and legal trade-offs shape a web data project.

Lecture

The lecture introduces web data as a research resource and provides frameworks for designing web data projects. It uses the following readings:

NoteReadings

The papers below provide guiding frameworks for the rest of this course, and chance is you’ll have to read it a couple of times (e.g., first to get an overview, and later to appreciate and use the details in your project).

Note: The web appendices contain valuable tables, so do not skip them.

Coaching

  • Online coaching session (#1)
  • Start narrowing your team project and select a candidate website, API, or existing dataset.