Methods for measuring the impact of authors and publications have been used in certain fields (such as library and information science) since at least the 1960s. In the last decade, however, metrics and measurements of impact have both become easier to do (with most data available online), and more widespread (with the rapid growth of the importance of measures such as the h-index across all disciplines). While these metrics have been applied to scientific and academic outputs, similar techniques can also be used to measure economic activity, advertising attention, political visibility of parties and movements, the online prevalence of languages and cultural materials, and many other phenomena of interest to social scientists. This methods option course for the OII MSc in “Social Science of the Internet” is designed to give students experience analysing data both from traditional sources (Web of Knowledge, Scopus, etc.) and from alternative sources (Google, social media, Wikipedia, etc.).
