Session 1: Getting Started

Félix Krawatzek and Andy Eggers present a new podcast series in which they discuss Text in the Social Sciences.

[Please scroll down for podcast recordings.]

Language is essential to human interaction, and so is essential to understanding politics and society.

Researchers in many disciplines now employ a variety of methods to analyse large bodies of text in more systematic and reliable ways.  These techniques are complementary to conventional reading techniques and may generate new insights for understanding texts or using text as data.

Suggested Further Reading: Session 1

• Marche, Stephen. “Literature Is not Data: Against Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/literature-is-not-data-against-digital-humanities
• Symposium: Discourse and Content Analysis: http://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/symposium-discourse-and-content-analysis
• Grimmer, Justin, and Stewart, Brandon. "Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts." Political Analysis 21, no. 3 (2013): 267-97: http://scholar.princeton.edu/bstewart/publications/text-data-promise-and-pitfalls-automatic-content-analysis-methods-political

Suggested Further Reading: Session 2

• Ädel, Annelie. "How to use corpus linguistics in the study of political discourse" In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics edited by Michael McCarthy, Anne O'Keeffe, 591-604. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013.
• Mayaffre, Damon, and Céline Poudat. "Quantitative Approaches to Political Discourse." In Speaking of Europe: Approaches to Complexity in European Political Discourse, edited by Kjersti Fløttum, 65-83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013.
• Gabrielatos, Costas, and Paul Baker. "Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Uk Press, 1996-2005." Journal of English Linguistics 36, no. 1 (2008): 5-38.
• Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michał Krzyżanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. "A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Uk Press." Discourse & Society 19, no. 3 (2008): 273-306.

Suggested Further Reading: Session 3

• Young, Lori, and Stuart Soroka. "Affective News: The Automated Coding of Sentiment in Political Texts." Political Communication 29, no. 2 (2012): 205-31.
• Soroka, Stuart N. "The Gatekeeping Function: Distributions of Information in Media and the Real World." Journal of Politics 74, no. 2 (Apr 2012): 514-28.
• Klüver, Heike. "Measuring Interest Group Influence Using Quantitative Text Analysis." European Union Politics 10, no. 4 (Dec 2009): 535-49.
• Bunea, Adriana, and Raimondas Ibenskas. "Quantitative Text Analysis and the Study of EU Lobbying and Interest Groups." European Union Politics 16, no 3 (2015): 429-455.

Suggested Further Reading: Session 4

• Mohr, John, and Petko Bogdanov. "Introduction—Topic Models: What They Are and Why They Matter." Poetics 41, no. 6 (2013): 545-69.
• Chang, Jonathan, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Sean Gerrish, Chong Wang, and David M. Blei. "Reading Tea Leaves: How Humans Interpret Topic Models." (2009).
• Roberts, Margaret E., Brandon M. Stewart, Dustin Tingley, Christopher Lucas, Jetson Leder-Luis, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Bethany Albertson, and David G. Rand. "Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses." American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 4 (2014): 1064-82.
• Jelveh, Zubin, Bruce Kogut, and Suresh Naidu. "Political Language in Economics" Working Paper http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2535453
• Shalit, Uri, Daphna Weinshall, and Gal Chechik. "Modeling Musical Influence with Topic Models." Proceedings of the 30^th International Conference on Machine Learning http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v28/shalit13.pdf

*Erratum*

Professor Andy Eggers would like to make a correction to the final session: the 1991 hit song 'More Than Words' was of course by the rock band Extreme, and not INXS. Apologies for any confusion caused.

Text Analysis Masterclass by Dr Ben Lauderdale

In addition to their podcasts, Andy and Félix would also like to include this lecture given by Ben Lauderdale (LSE) on Text Analysis: