As you may have noticed, I often use this blog as a placeholder to keep track of information that may come in useful in teaching. Along with the questions I highlighted in my last post, one of the other big confusions I find is understanding the voting system we have. TV to the rescue! Adam…
During this election season, I’ve realized how little practical knowledge of voting first time and young voters have. So I decided to look around the web and see what resources I could find and came across Campus Vote, which provides information on dates, registering, and requirements to vote for each state. Headcount has a great list…
So I’ve just gotten back from my first round of fieldwork, and am about to go back again. One of the wonders of doing fieldwork now is that there are a host of apps to help you organize, plan and carry out your research. While I used many of the same apps I do everyday…
(Originally posted on my old blog on Jan 9, 2014) As part of the content analysis I am doing for my dissertation, I’ve started to look at using Python to scrape documents from the web, as well as clean them up for analysis. In theory this should save me lots of man-hours of work; in…
(Originally posted on my old blog on Dec. 9, 2013) I’ve had several colleagues ask about using content analysis, so I’ve decided to put together a list of links and other resources in one spot. A word on the qual vs. quant divide. Basically, when it comes to text as data, for me, your research…
(Originally posted on my old blog on Nov. 27, 2013; image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons) Voting systems are hard to introduce to students, especially some of the more creative ones. Fortunately, the internet has some really helpful resources to help explain different voting systems and the effect they have on parliaments. One of the best…
(Originally posted on my old blog on Nov 27, 2013) Here’s a quick video starting John Cleese where he tries to sell UK voters on switching to a proportional representation system (spoiler alert: he fails). It covers the basics of how a system would work. While it’s rather old school, it still provides a very…
