This page contains the materials for the short MA political science course Automated Text Analysis in Political Science for political science MA students at CEU (6-17 May 2019). Materials will be added as we go along.
Instructor: Martijn Schoonvelde
You can find the syllabus here. For any questions, send me an email at mschoonvelde[at]gmail[dot]com.
| Date | Link | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| May 10, 19:00h | Assignment 1 | Solutions |
| May 20, 19:00h | Assignment 2 | Solutions |
| Date | Slides | Date | Slides |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 6 | Link | May 13 | Link |
| May 7 | Link | May 14 | Link |
| May 8 | Link | May 15 | Link |
| May 9 | Link | May 16 | Link |
| May 10 | Link | May 17 | Presentations |
| Date | Link | Solutions |
|---|---|---|
| May 6 | Introduction | |
| May 7 | Script | Exercise solution |
| May 8 | Script, Data | Exercise solution |
| May 9 | Script, Data | |
| May 10 | Script, Data | |
| May 13 | Script, Data | |
| May 14 | Script, Data | |
| May 15 | New data | |
| May 16 | New approaches | |
| May 17 | Presentations |
| Name | Link |
|---|---|
| Alfredo Sanchez | Link |
| Manna Toth | Link |
For some code in the code practice scripts, I made use of materials by Jos Elkink here, and here, and Wouter van Atteveldt here and here. The setup of the code practice scripts follows the structure in Welbers, K., Van Atteveldt, W., & Benoit, K. (2017) (see below for citation). For some slides in week 1 of the course I made use of materials by Pablo Barberá and Ken Benoit here. Thanks to all.
May 6: 15:30 - 17:10:
- Introduction to the course and to EUSpeech, a dataset which will use for running examples: Link
- Required reading:
- Schumacher, G., Schoonvelde, M., Traber, D., Dahiya, T., & De Vries, E. (2016). EUSpeech: a New Dataset of EU Elite Speeches. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Advances in Computational Analysis of Political Text, 75-80.
- Michel, J.B., Shen, Y.K., Aiden, A.P., Veres, A., Gray, M.K., Pickett, J.P., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., Orwant, J. and Pinker, S., (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014), 176–182.
- Wilkerson, J. and Casas, A. (2017). Large-scale computerized text analysis in political science: opportunities and challenges. Annual Review of Political Science 20: 529-544.
May 7: 15:30 - 17:10:
- A survey of automated text analysis in political science. Supervised and unsupervised methods. Validation, validation, validation. Text Analysis in R.
- Required reading:
- Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267-297.
- Welbers, K., Van Atteveldt, W., & Benoit, K. (2017). Text Analysis in R. Communication Methods and Measures, 11(4), 245-265.
- Benoit, K., Watanabe, K., Wang, H, Nulty, P., Obeng, A., Mueller, & Matsuo, A. (2018). Quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(30), 774.
May 8: 15:30 - 19:00:
- Pre-processing data. Going from text to data, including a few notes of caution. Discussion of the research design and research note.
- Required reading:
- Denny, M. J., & Spirling, A. (2018). Text preprocessing for unsupervised learning: why it matters, when it misleads, and what to do about it. Forthcoming at Political Analysis.
- Schoonvelde, M., Schumacher, G. and Bakker, B.N., (2019). Friends with text as data ben- efits: assessing and extending the use of automated text analysis in political science and political psychology. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 7(1), 124–143.
May 9: 15:30 - 17:10:
- Systematically describing and comparing texts.
- Required reading:
- Chapters 3 and 4 of Silge, J., & Robinson, D. (2018). Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach. O’Reilly Media, Inc. Available at https://www.tidytextmining.com
- Cross, J. & Hermansson, H., (2017). Legislative amendments and informal politics in the European Union: A text reuse approach. European Union Politics, 18(4): 581–602.
- Bischof, D. & Senninger, R., (2018). Simple politics for the people? Complexity in campaign messages and political knowledge. European Journal of Political Research, 57(2): 473–495.
May 10: 15:30 - 17:10:
-
Using dictionaries to measure sentiment, happiness and other things we're interested in.
-
Required reading:
- Pennebaker JW & King L (1999) Linguistic styles: language use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1296-1312.
- Young, L., & Soroka, S. (2012). Affective news: The automated coding of sentiment in political texts. Political Communication, 29(2), 205-231.
- Kraft, P. (2018). Measuring morality in political attitude expression. Journal of Politics, 80(3): 1028–1033.
- Hawkins, K. & Castanho Silva, B. (2018). Text Analysis: Big Data Approaches. In: The Ideational Approach to Populism: Theory, Method & Analysis, edited by Kirk A. Hawkins, Ryan Carlin, Levente Littvay, and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser. London: Routledge.
- Ramey, A. J., Klingler, J. D., & Hollibaugh, G. E. (2019). Measuring elite personality using speech. Political Science Research and Methods, 7(1),163–184.
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17:00: Coding Assignment 1 Due
May 13: 15:30 - 17:10:
- Scaling methods locating text on an underlying (political) dimension. What do they mean? And how do they work?
- Required reading:
- Slapin JB & Proksch SO (2008) A Scaling Model for Estimating Time-Serial Positions from Texts. American Journal of Political Science 52, 705-722.
- Hjorth, F., Klemmensen, R., Hobolt, S., Hansen, M. E., & Kurrild-Klitgaard, P. (2015). Computers, coders, and voters: Comparing automated methods for estimating party positions. Research & Politics, 2(2).
- Daniel Schwarz, Denise Traber, & Kenneth Benoit (2017). Estimating intra- party preferences: comparing speeches to votes. Political Science Research and Methods 5(2): 379–396.
May 14: 15:30 - 17:10:
- Topic models, unsupervised models for summarizing what a text is about.
- Required reading:
- Blei, D. M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 77-84.
- Roberts, M et al.. (2014). Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses. American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 1064-1082.
- Boussalis, C. & Coan, T. (2016). Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt. Global Environmental Change, 36: 89–100.
May 15: 15:30 - 19:00:
- New developments in data: (i) crowd-sourcing data (ii) images as data, (iii) automated speech recognition, (iv) machine translation.
- Required reading:
- Benoit, K., Conway, D., Lauderdale, B. E., Laver, M., & Mikhaylov, S. (2016). Crowd-sourced text analysis: Reproducible and agile production of political data. American Political Science Review, 110(2), 278–295.
- Proksch, S.O., Wratil, C. and W ̈ackerle, J., (2019). Testing the validity of automatic speech recognition for political text analysis. Political Analysis, 1–21
- De Vries, E., Schoonvelde, M. & Schumacher, G., (2018). No longer lost in translation: Evi- dence that Google Translate works for comparative bag-of-words text applications. Political Analysis, 26(4), 417–430.
- Torres, M. (2019). Give me the full picture: Using computer vision to understand visual frames and political communication. Working paper.
May 16: 15:30 - 17:10:
- New developments in modeling: (i) word embeddings, (ii) ltta
- Flash talks
- Loose ends
- Required reading:
- Rudkowsky, E., Haselmayer, M., Wastian, M., Jenny, M., Emrich, Sˇ. & Sedlmair, M., (2018). More than bags of words: Sentiment analysis with word embeddings. Communication Methods and Measures, 12(2-3), 140–157.
- Kleinberg, B., Mozes, M., & van der Vegt, I. (2018). Identifying the sentiment styles of YouTube’s vloggers, EMNLP 2018.
May 17: 15:30 - 17:10:
- Research design presentations.
TBD: Coding Assignment 2 Due
TBD: Research Note Due