Political Data Science Hackathon

This course integrates team-based problem-solving with real-world work-life cases provided by stakeholders from industry and public sector. Participants also gain hands-on experience with data science methods.

Alex Moltzau and I established this course in 2022, which has been held over six weeks during the International Summer School in both 2022 and 2023.

In this course, we collaborated with various organizations that provided real-life challenges for our students to address. Students learned data science techniques to tackle these problems, ultimately writing reports and presenting their findings.

The course attracted students from diverse disciplines, fostering cross-disciplinary teamwork. To maximize the benefits of this diversity, we also taught foundational skills for effective collaboration in varied teams.

Students gained practical experience in fundamental data science techniques, including R programming with tidyverse, data wrangling, descriptive statistics, data collection, visualization, text analysis, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning. They applied these techniques to real-world cases, enabling them to understand the utility of these techniques in practical scenarios.

As the course convener and lecturer, I have taught both years alongside Eric Nilsen, Jonas W. Schmid, Sondre Elstad, and Louisa Boulaziz.

Link to the course book for 2023.