Christine Sheldon

I designed and taught this course in autumn 2023 and 2024 for the MSc in Digital Scholarship at the University of Oxford, introducing students to the practical use of machine learning (ML) methods in humanities and social-science research. The course equips students with the conceptual understanding and applied skills needed to begin using ML in their own projects, without requiring extensive prior knowledge.

Teaching focuses on hands-on implementation in Python using the scikit-learn library. Students develop familiarity with core techniques across supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing, and apply these methods to real research questions. The course culminates in an independent project, allowing students to design and execute their own machine-learning analysis. The full course structure and weekly topics are outlined in the syllabus.

In Autumn 2022, I taught this foundational course on the MSc in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. The course introduces students to social data science as a way of translating social phenomena into structured data for analysis, combining hands-on computational training with theoretical reflection on how data represent social reality.

In the course, students work in Python to manipulate, clean, and analyse data while engaging with broader methodological questions: how knowledge claims are constructed, how different data formats (such as tabular data, networks, and embeddings) influence interpretation, and what is gained or obscured when social life is rendered computationally tractable. The course integrates practical skills with core concepts from statistics and computational text analysis.

In Spring 2022, I taught the methods option course Wrangling Data for the MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. The course was designed to equip students with practical skills for cleaning, shaping, and managing data. An essential step before any meaningful analysis can take place. Students learned techniques for parsing text files, handling JSON, aggregating data in databases, and extracting data efficiently for research purposes. Rather than focusing on analysis or visualization, the course concentrated on the often-overlooked challenges of preparing “dirty” real-world data for use, providing a foundation that can be applied across a wide range of substantive research projects.

Comparative Government is a second-year undergraduate course in the PPE programme at the University of Oxford that introduces students to the theories and methods of comparative political analysis, combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The course covers three main areas: regimes and states, including state-building, colonial legacies, democratization, and variation across hybrid and autocratic regimes; institutions, such as constitutional design, executives, legislatures, judiciaries, bureaucracies, devolved powers, and electoral systems; and political actors, including parties, interest groups, social movements, and political activism. Students are also expected to engage with causal inference, mechanisms, and challenges like selection and endogeneity.

I taught tutorials for this course at Lady Margaret Hall, guiding one-to-two students per session.

Politics in Europe is an undergraduate elective in the PPE programme at the University of Oxford that provides a comparative study of national party and institutional systems across Europe. The course explores key issues in European politics, including democratization, institutional relations, political economy, and party politics.

I taught tutorials for this course at Lady Margaret Hall and Jesus College, working with one-to-two students per session.

The Politics of the European Union is an undergraduate elective in the PPE programme at the University of Oxford that examines the history, institutions, and policy processes of the European Union. The course covers the theories and historical development of European integration, the main EU institutions, decision-making procedures, specific policy areas, and the EU’s relationships with the wider world. It also explores questions of democracy within the EU and the impact of European integration on the domestic politics and policies of member states.

I taught tutorials for this course at Hertford College and Lady Margaret Hall, working with one-to-two students per session.