Text as Data

Course introduces students to the quantitative analysis of text from a social science perspective, with a special focus on politics. The course is applied in nature, and while we will give some theoretical treatment of the topics, the primary aim is to help students understand the types of questions we can ask with text, and how to go about answering them. We first explain how texts may be modeled as quantitative entities and described. We move to supervised and unsupervised techniques in some detail, before dealing with some 'special topics' (e.g. embeddings) that arise in particular lines of research.