A three-day Summer School which will provide a comprehensive introduction to the tools and systems needed for applied social science research.

Organiser: Professor Mirko Draca, University of Warwick (CAGE Director)

Lecturers/Presenters: Arthur Turrell (Bank of England), Eric Melander (Birmingham), Peter John Lambert (LSE), Marie Segger (The Economist magazine).

PROGRAMME TBC

The summer school will cover the following topics: -

• Coding for Economists: Organising a professional coding workflow using Github and Python.
• Data Management and Analysis: Case studies on how to put together complex repeated cross-section and panel datasets, along with how to present and analyse them.
• Digitisation of Historical Data: Converting hard copy tabular and text data into electronic form. How to employ OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools and what you can do when those methods won’t work. How to use GIS (Geographic Information System) techniques to extract spatial data from maps. Using non-standard approaches to measure historical phenomena.
• Working on the Cloud: Your desktop machine is too slow so you have to move to cloud computing. We’ll provide a guide to setting up and running big data analysis on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Using LLMs in Economics Research: Large-language Models are all the rage. We’ll show how they can be used to build new types of data, for example, the codification of large text databases into a structured form.
• Research Design: Faculty will present examples of their research and go under the surface to show the data construction, analysis and workflows that were involved in putting together a paper.
• Data Visualisation: How to build creative and well-designed data visualisations.

The timetable of the summer school will be organised around lectures in the first half of the day with research presentations / case studies in the second half. There’ll also be chances for hands-on and participatory work by students in the afternoon sessions.