• Feddersen Alexandra

• Feddersen Alexandra

The course consists of two parts.

In the theoretical part, we will discuss theories of actors’ communication strategies on social media. Students are asked to participate actively in class and to come to class having read the mandatory literature.

The second part will be an applied workshop, where students will learn to download twitter data using R’s „rtweet“-package (Kearney 2019), and to analyze it using content analysis. Students are asked to participate actively in every workshop, bring their laptop computers and install the software R prior to the first class.

Kearney, M. W. (2019). rtweet: Collecting Twitter Data. R package version 0.6.9 Retrieved from https://cran.r-project.org/package=rtweet

By the end of the course students will be able to:

• understand actors’ communication strategies on social media through different theoretical approaches;
• critically assess the advantages and pitfalls of communication on social media;
• use the fundamentals of the software R;
• download twitter data;
• analyze text data using the fundamentals of content analysis; and

apply these analyses to help actors develop communication strategies on social media

Students will be graded based on an exercise of their choice (30% of the final grade) and a take-home exam (70% of the final grade).

Students who do not reach a minimum attendance of 70% of sessions will be asked to do an additional graded exercise.

Exam duration: 90 minutes

Re-take exam only

Final grade average: 30% exercise, 70% re-take exam