Text: Marianne Fuglsang Welling Farsinsen, ITS Photo: AAU

 

At the Department of Politics and Administration, a team of students is working on a newly established specialization in Social Data Science. Jakob Hast Prins, one of the students, shares:

- I had a great interest in quantitative data already in my bachelor's degree, and the fact that you now have computer power available for data processing provides completely new and exciting opportunities. This new way of looking at data - that data is not just something with cells in an Excel sheet but can for example be a collection of certain types of texts from several different websites, such as meeting minutes, allows you to see patterns and correlations in data that you had not immediately thought of or previously had the opportunity to see. It's quite creative, says Jakob.

 

In the specialization, it is mainly the UCloud platform that is used. Kristian Gade Kjelmann, who teaches Social Data Science, explains:

- The whole idea is to try to bring together some of the methodological developments that have taken place over the last 10 years or so and help students become proficient in them. Typically, the common denominator is new forms of data: text, images, video and data sources from the internet, which were previously considered purely qualitative data. What these data sources have in common is that they require high performance and sometimes a complicated computer setup to work with them quantitatively. With UCloud, we can make the necessary resources available to everyone and we can easily share, collaborate and practice on the same datasets on the platform, Kristian explains.

 

The computing power and data management in UCloud not only adds value in the classroom, but points towards life after graduation, Jacob explains:

- Being able to process data in this field between qualitative and quantitative, which used to be so rigidly divided, we now have machine learning to help us. For example, we learn to develop some machine learning models ourselves, and these are some great tools to get from your education, which can really be used for a lot of things and in different ways. It is not locked to any particular field, and it is motivating to see that there is already a demand for these skills in the labor market, concludes Jakob Hast Prins.

AAU's IT research support unit CLAAUDIA offers UCloud to all AAU researchers and for teaching purposes. Please contact CLAAUDIA at claaudia@aau.dk for further information or questions.