COMM5520: Applied Communication Research

COMM5520C (2024-2025 Term 1)
Teacher: Prof. LIANG Hai (NAH310)
WMY406/NAH209: Tue. 6:30 PM - 9:15 PM

Textbooks:

• Foundations of data and digital journalism
• Data for journalists: A practical guide for CAR
• Working with numbers and statistics
• Calling Bullshit

Tools:

• Google Sheet
• ChatGPT @ CUHK
• Journalist’s Toolbox

Course Materials:

• Syllabus
• Schedule with slides
  • Week 01: Introduction to Applied Research
    • Why numbers are important for journalists?
    • Spreadsheet
    • AI & LLM
  • Week 02: Data Quality & Sources
    • Data and data quality
    • Find data: Awesome Public Datasets
  • Week 03: Social Media Data
    • Representativeness (non-random sample, self-selection bias)
    • Scraping + API (Public APIs for free)
    • IMPORTHTML() + IMPORTXML() + ImportJSON + Google Sheet Tutorial
  • Week 04: Presenting Numbers
    • mean/percentage
    • comparing numbers vs. comparing percentages
    • percentage change vs. percentage point change
  • Week 05: Spreadsheets I
    • NAH209
    • importing
    • basic math
  • Week 06: Presenting Relationships
    • cross-tab/comparing means
    • inappropriate comparisons
  • Week 07: Spreadsheets II
    • NAH209 (Quiz I)
    • sort
    • filter
    • pivot
  • Week 08: Correlation & Causality
  • Week 09: Spreadsheets III
    • NAH209
    • cross-tab
    • correlation
  • Week 10: Spreadsheets IV
    • NAH209 (Quiz II)
    • data visualization » Slides for self-learning
  • Week 11: Big Data & Machine Learning
    • Digital Scholarship Lab @ Library
  • Week 12: AI + LLMs
    • ChatGPT
    • Gemini
    • Best practices for text generation prompts
  • Week 13: Revision + Final Exam
    • NAH209