Project Brief: Analyse a spatial network

Summative assessment

Assignment description

You need to identify and analyse a spatial network you are interested in. This involves:

  • Selecting a spatial network, which is of interest for you, finding, using and analysing relevant network data – more on this below.

  • Setting up research questions. You will need to set up clear research questions that your analysis will answer. Although I don’t expect a full literature review section in your report, you need to link these research questions to previous literature.

  • Analysing your network. You will need to employ relevant methods and tools that we discussed during the course (from data acquisition to network analysis and from diversity measures to spatial interaction models) to answer your research questions. The methods you will use should be appropriate for the research questions you need to answer. I will encourage you (and give extra points) if you utilise relevant methods beyond those discussed during the classes. Your methodological choices should be fully justified in the text and aligned with the research questions.

  • Writing up the report, which needs to be adequately structured (i.e. introduce the problem, link it to previous literature, describe the methods and the data, present and discuss the results, indicate some key outcomes). The report should be written as an RMarkdown or Quarto document and knitted as an .html document that allows the reader to see both the text, the code you will develop and the output of the code. Your report should include tables and figures where appropriate – these form an important element of the assessment. Be critical to what outputs will be included in the report. The report needs to be appropriately referenced.

Data sets

In order to address the different interests the cohort might have, the data choice is up to you. I offer below a few ideas, but if you want to analyse other data, please get in touch with me directly to discuss. You will need to do this early on during the term, so please start thinking about the report early.

  • US internal migration flows. You can use data from the American Community Survey (ACS). There are quite a few R packages, which enable you to directly access these data through an API.

  • Africa migration flows from WorldPop.

  • Data for Good by Facebook. There are quite a few interesting datasets there. Some of them are ready to download, some require an application. If you are interested in the latter, apply sooner than later.

Word limit and marking criteria

The report should be 3,500 long excluding references and code. It is worth 100% of the unit’s mark and on top of the programme marking criteria, I will also consider:

  • The reproducibility of the analysis.

  • The quality of visualisations and tables and the appearance of the knitted .html document.

  • The relevance and the novelty of setting up specific research questions.

  • The use of relevant tools beyond the ones directly demonstrated during this unit.

  • The robustness of the analysis and modelling.

  • The complexity of the data that you will use.

Deadline

Project submission: Thursday, 10th December 2026

Generative AI Usage

The level of AI use allowed in this course is classified as Category 3: Selective according to University of Bristol AI guidelines.

You may use AI tools to aid your coding and methodological design:

Exploring concepts: You may use AI as a mechanism for researching and exploring relevant coding tools and methodological options that may help you answer your research questions. You should always read the documentation of selected sources to make sure you understand what you are using and how to use it.

Debugging: You may use AI to comment on and debug your own code, to help you identify errors or improvements.

Generating code: You may use AI to directly generate code for your use. Be careful, as AI can generate code that will fail to run, generate incorrect results, or contain superflous or confusing content. You always remain responsible for the final output of any code you generate, and should be able to understand the code and apply it to other use cases.

You should not use AI tools to substantively help write any assessed prose (i.e. written text, as opposed to code). For writing prose, AI use aligns with Category 2: “You can use AI tools for spelling and grammar check. You can use it for rewording occasional phrases, but not sentences, large parts of text or paragraphs. It should not change the meaning or the context of your work”.

Uses of tools outside of the stated limitations may incur academic misconduct penalties. You are not obligated to use AI tools in your work, and no additional credit is awarded for their use.

If you use AI tools, please include an “AI Disclosure” statement at the end of your report explaining how you used AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Claude) to assist with your work. This statement will not count toward the 3,500-word limit and will not affect your final mark. Its purpose is to promote honest and responsible use of AI.

Formative assessment

What data do you want to use for your project? Send an email to Emmanouil describing and justifying the data you want to use by Tuesday 3 November 2026 to receive non-marked feedback.