Fall/Winter Timetable

POL2578H1F L0101

Topics in Methods

Computational Text Analysis

Themes

Recent advances in computational social science have considerably increased the reach of scholars interested in studying political language. Moreover, swathes of digitized text documents are now available to researchers, including parliamentary records, committee proceedings, bills, laws, international treaties, news reports, social media discussions, blogs, and so forth. This course introduces students to the state of the art in the field of computational text analysis. It covers the most widely used methods and goes through the key steps of computer-assisted analysis, from the extraction of online textual data to empirical analysis. The course also includes an introduction to machine learning.

Texts

TBA

Format and Requirements

The course takes place in a computer lab and combines advanced lectures with interactive learning activities. In-class exercises will be done primarily with the Python programming language. The course does not have formal requirements, but some familiarity with programming and/or linguistics may be useful.