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Spring Camps

Studying a Warwick Q-Step Centre degree means that your learning continues well beyond the lecture theatre. As well as providing traditional training in specialised quantitative methods, we also provide opportunities to develop these skills collaboratively and broaden your education outside of the classroom.

Our annual Spring Camp brings students together from across the University to apply cutting-edge quantitative methods to real world problems. You will be taught by internationally-recognised academics from Warwick and other top universities, as well as non-academic professionals who are the forefront of their career in Policy and Industry. Professionally relevant, the Spring Camp is a valuable opportunity to find out more about the career trajectories that involve data analysis and enhance your employability.

Colleagues from across the social sciences, humanities and science disciplines will come together to work on methodological challenges relating to global issues, so students will be exposed to the wider university environment and have a sense of how disciplinary boundaries become blurred when working on ‘big data problems’

Dr Emma Uprichard

Director of the Warwick Q-Step Centre (2013-16)

The quantitative methods Spring Camp is a two-day event which is organised for students in their second year and takes place during the Easter vacation period at the University of Warwick.

The Spring Camps are designed to:

  • Map onto Warwick’s Global Research Priorities (GRP) themes (e.g. Cities, Food, Global Governance);
  • Embed cutting-edge quantitative methods into real world problems;
  • Enable undergraduates to have the opportunity to interact with postgraduates, to help bridge the undergraduate/postgraduate divide;
  • Provide students with a different kind of learning experience (short-term intense rather than the weekly tempo of standard modules), so students gain a taste of what real world research consultancy can be like;
  • Immerse students in applied forward-facing data challenges;
  • Provide students with practical hands-on lab-based learning;
  • Expose students to the wider University research community across the disciplines.

Students on undergraduate QM degrees are strongly encouraged to attend a spring camp at least once during their degree, Students who attend the Spring Camp will gain a certificate of attendance.

 

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Upcoming Event

Register HERELink opens in a new window!

This year's annual Spring Camp on Text as Data, organised by Ulf LiebeLink opens in a new window and Philippe BlanchardLink opens in a new window, will take place between,

Tuesday 28 - Wednesday 29 June 2022.

The exact timings of the programme are to be confirmed but the start and finish times will be 10:00 - 16:00 for Day 1 and 09:30 - 16:00 for Day 2.

Day 1 (morning)

On Day 1 (morning) experts will give presentations on various topics related to quantitative text analysis. There will be an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of each session.

10:00 - 11:00 Pierre RatinaudLink opens in a new window (Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches Appliquées en Sciences Sociales, Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier)
Statistical text analysis with IRaMuTeQ : examples in the political field
The main objective of this talk is to present different methods of statistical text analysis available in the free software IRaMuTeQ. We will use the example of the french presidential election of 2017 on Twitter to present Reinert clustering, similarities analysis and the use of Labbé’s distance. The Reinert method have the same goal as Topic Models : describe the content of text corpus. It describes texts in terms of “lexical worlds” that represent the different thematic of the text and allow to study statistical relations between these thematic and metadata associate with texts. Similarities analysis produce graphs that show co-occurrences relations between words in texts and Labbé’s distance is mainly use in this context to study relations between clusters produce on different corpus. The main example in this presentation is based on the analysis of a large corpus of 38 millions of tweets relative to the french presidential election written between 25/11/2016 and 12/05/2017.
11:00 - 12:00 Oliver Hawkins Link opens in a new window(Data Scientist)
Text analysis at the House of Commons Library

Oliver Hawkins spent ten years working for the House of Commons Library, which is the research service for UK Members of Parliament. During his last three years, he worked as the Library's first data scientist and carried out several projects involving the computational analysis of text. In this talk, Oliver will discuss some of the key issues he has encountered working with text data, and describe projects using supervised and unsupervised machine learning to model topics for the Library's database of enquiries from MPs.

Day 1 (afternoon) | Day 2 (full day)

Practical workshop on quantitative text analysis, provided by Fabio VottaLink opens in a new window (University of Amsterdam).

We live in a digital society, and enormous amounts of textual data are generated every day. Text analysis for social science research is not new, but with recent computational advances, we can now process text much more efficiently and in greater quantity. Quantitative text analysis is a set of tools that help make sense of textual data by systematically extracting information from texts. This workshop will teach you the fundamentals of quantitative text analysis and provide you with hands-on experience with cutting-edge methods implemented in R. The workshop covers important basics (e.g., pre-processing, tokenization, and part-of-speech tagging) as well as three types of analytic techniques: rule-based, supervised, and unsupervised methods (dictionary methods, topic models and machine learning, respectively). By the end of this workshop, participants will have a good understanding of the potentials and limitations of quantitative text analysis, as well as some experience working with the R software packages for conducting this type of analysis.

The event is free to attend.

Previous Events

Find out more about our previous Spring Camps

2021Link opens in a new window

2019

2018

2017

2016