This workshop is built on a recent study on the peculiarities of harvesting social media data to explore armed conflict dynamics in remote, information-scarce regions. Part of a recently published book (Data Science for Migration and Mobility, Oxford University Press, 2022) this chapter introduces a workflow for event extraction from a warzone (Operation Olive Branch area) through January-March 2018 that uses social media data, and benchmarks it against two of the most frequently-used violent event datasets: UCDP/PRIO and ACLED. Ultimately, the workshop uses the code employed for data extraction for this task, and will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using social media data to explore violent events and forced migration.

Master students

Doctoral candidates

Postdoctoral researchers

 

Participants should come to the session with a laptop that already has Base-R and Rstudio installed, as well as a Twitter account for API authentication