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Project Proposal (10 points)

Produce a research question and proposal for your term project using a computational social science research design

Elements of a project proposal

  1. Clearly state a research question
    • Maybe give a few citations (not a full literature review)
    • Give a little information about why it is interesting
    • Give a little information about what your contribution will be
  2. Describe how you will answer that question
    • What data will you use?
      • Maybe give a preliminary figure/plot/table
    • What theory will you use to interpret the data?
    • What analyses and computational tools will you use?
  3. What do you think your answer might be?
    • What are the potential channels and alternatives?

Proposal format

  1. You should prepare a 5 minute quasi-Ignite-style presentation using slides
    • Exactly 10 slides, auto-advancing every 30 seconds
    • Use any software you want to generate the slides as long as you include a PDF version
    • Here is a LaTeX slides template you can use if you wish.
  2. Push your slides to your project repository on your GitHub fork in the Proposal folder no later than 11:59pm, Tuesday, April 9.
  3. You will present your proposal with slides in class on Wednesday, April 10.

Things to watch out for

  • State your research question clearly
    • Usually a narrower scope is better
    • Title should refer to a question
  • Make sure to use a computationally-enhanced research design
    • This could involve computational elements for data collection or statistical learning methods
    • This could involve running a digital survey or experiment or simulation
    • What you should not prepare - a basic OLS/logistic regression model reevaluating a commonly used observational data set. Do something more computationally cutting edge.
  • Make sure you can get the data
  • If you have a title slide, know that we will spend 30 seconds there
  • Manage your time during the presentation
  • Don't spend too much time on the literature
  • Answer questions but don't get derailed

How to come up with a good project

  • What topic areas are you interested in?
    • Read the most current articles.
  • Extend one of those papers in a small way.
    • New data
    • New population
    • Question about different part of the data
    • New/better methods
  • Talk to faculty.