Politics, Big Data and Quantitative Methods - MA

Big data and quantitative methods are transforming political processes and decisions in everyday life. Local, national and international administrations are making ‘open data’ available to wide audiences; giant, world-level web organisations are putting more and more services in synergy; and some private companies or governments are developing strongly ideological projects in relation with big data. All these issues involve data in text, image, numeric and video formats in unprecedented scales. This means there is a growing need for trained specialists who will have the capacity to compete and/or collaborate with strictly business or technique-oriented actors on the basis of sound knowledge from political andinternational studies.

In contrast to degrees such as Data Science or Data Analytics, where the focus ends up being almost exclusively on data practices and computational tools, our MA in Big Data provides you with a knowledge and understanding of the implications of different approaches to issues concerning big data and public policy. Warwick has considerable expertise in quantitative methods, located in our department, along with the department of Sociology, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) and the Q-Step Centre.

Given that a noteworthy part of big data is social data, this MA programme seeks to attract students from a variety of social science related disciplines; you do not need a background in statistics to be eligible for the course. Graduates of this degree will be able both to engage technically with data released at a new scale and to keep a critical expertise on their relevance and quality, skills which are increasingly required in the competitive global job market.