Center for Empirical Analyses of Political Economy as a Top Global University Project, Waseda University, invited Dr. Luigi Curini to offer a course named “Polimetrics －Advanced Scaling Techniques in Political Science” in the 3rd Quarter from the end of September 2015 to November 2015. Dr. Luigi Curini is an associate professor of political science at University of Milan. He earned his Ph.D. in Institutions and Organizations from the University of Milan in 2002. Dr. Luigi Curini has published many articles relevant to spatial theory of voting, social media analysis and sentiment analysis.
This intensive course was a graduate level course and aimed to teach students the main theories and related analytical skills regarding the estimation of policy space of political party. Focusing both on the theory and practice, this course consisted of two sessions: the lecture session and the lab session. In the lecture session, spatial theory and various research models have been introduced. Meanwhile, in the lab session, based on what they had learned in the lecture session, students made practices in estimating policy space by utilizing the analysis software like Stata, R and CyberSenate. Furthermore, following students’ research interest, this course also gave a special attention on the analysis of social media. Dr. Curini discussed different approaches in the big data analysis.
Besides the intensive course, Dr. Curini gave a talk about his latest research in the SGU seminar on November 24th. The research focuses on the perception of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL), by analyzing nearly 13 million tweets in Arabic from 53 countries. An approach named “Supervised Aggregated Sentiment
Analysis” has been employed for this purpose. The result showed that there is a so-called “loneliness effect”: the more negative a nation’s Twitter comments are toward ISIS, the more people of that country left to fight for ISIS, becoming so-called “foreign fighters”. Dr. Curini suggested that it may be dangerous to shut down social media accounts held by ISIS, since it may further isolate those sympathizers. Lively discussions about the SASA approach and research results between Dr. Curini and participants went through the whole seminar.
