📍 Hybrid Event: MZES, Mannheim + Zoom
📆 December 7, 2022
Political research often involves tedious coding of politically relevant data or relations: Political biographies, actors' characteristics or the networks between them. However, often, this data is already available: Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that collects historical and contemporary (political) facts as relational data. However, researchers often hesitate to use these sources due to technical barriers. This introductory talk introduces Wikidata and its potential uses. It then showcases a work-in-progress application that measures the persistence of the legacies of slave-ownership in British politics. Drawing connections between historical slave-owners and historical and present-day MPs allows to quantify these legacies and their persistence over time. Finally, to enable participants to use Wikidata in their own research, the talk includes a practical part on collecting and using Wikidata with R. To follow the practical applications, please bring a laptop with installations of R, RStudio, and the packages dplyr and tidywikidatar.
📝 Slides
👤 Theresa Gessler is Junior Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). Her work centers on conflicts around democracy, immigration, digitalization and patterns of party competition. Next to classical political science methods, her research uses text-as-data, webscraping and various types of digital trace data.