Topics in Sociological Analysis (476-0-20)

Topic

Computational Analysis of Text

Instructors

Oscar Maria Stuhler

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 222: Mon 10:30AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

"Computational Text Analysis"

Much of the social world is stored in digital text. Such textual traces include social media posts, email correspondences, party manifestos, blogs, novels, newspaper articles, press releases, medical records, academic articles, and much more. Not only are archival data increasingly available in electronic form, but more and more human communication and interaction occurs natively through digital text. These vast amounts of data can be a treasure trove for social science - but to make them useful for our purposes, we need natural language processing and machine learning methods.

This class offers an overview of text analytical tools currently used in social science research. You will be introduced to a set of methods and provided with examples of how they are applied to answer concrete social science research questions. Beyond surveying approaches, we will explore some of the methods ourselves, and you will learn how to use them for your own work. In this class, we will use R. Therefore, some coding experience (or exceptional motivation to attain it independently alongside the class) is expected.

Teaching Method

Lecture, discussion, and lab

Class Materials (Required)

All materials for this course will be made available on Canvas - no purchase necessary.

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Sociology/MORS PhD Students

Associated Classes

LAB - Harris Hall L04: Wed 2:00PM - 2:50PM