Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences

Undergraduate

Language is the medium for politics and political conflict. Candidates debate during elections. Representatives write laws. Nations negotiate peace treaties. Clerics issue Fatwas. Citizens express their opinions about politics on social media sites. These examples, and many others, suggest that to understand what politics is about, we need to know what political actors are saying and writing. This course introduces techniques to collect, analyze, and utilize large collections of text for social science inferences. Students will also have the opportunity to develop their programming abilities. We will explore a range of datasets from the text of The Federalist Papers to the millions of tweets sent to and from members of Congress.