Social Data Science MSc

The multidisciplinary MSc in Social Data Science provides the social and technical expertise needed to analyse unstructured heterogeneous data about human behaviour, thereby informing our understanding of the human world. Social data generated digitally (from, for example, social media, communications platforms, Internet of Things [IoT] devices, sensors/wearables, and mobile phones) offer a way to accumulate new large-scale data, in addition to existing data that have been converted to digital formats. These data can be put to work helping us understand big issues of crucial interest to the social sciences, industry, and policy-makers including social, economic and political behaviour, interpersonal relationships, market design, group formation, identity, international movement, ethics and responsible ways to enhance the social value of data, and many other topics. The growing field of social data science involves developing the science of these social data: creating viable datasets out of messy, real world data; and developing the tools and techniques to analyse them to tell us something about the world, through explanation, prediction and the testing of interventions. In this way, social data science offers a data science where the data relates to individual and social behaviour and a social science with generation and analysis of real-time transactional data at its centre. Employers recognise the value of a degree from the University of Oxford, and graduates from our existing programmes have secured excellent positions in industry, government, NGOs, or have gone on to pursue doctoral studies at top universities. For example, non-academic destinations of recent graduates have included large Internet companies such as Google or Facebook, smaller start-ups like , as well as regulatory positions and consultancy. MSc alumni have progressed to further graduate study at institutions such as Oxford, Harvard, Princeton and LSE.