Quantitative data are central to social and political research. As online forums proliferate, the amount of sources of quantitative data available has exploded over the past decades while publishing, news, governmental, archival and social organisations continue to produce content in both online and offline sources. Exploring fully such information on important political matters requires tools that enable us to systematically collect, manage, analyse and present types of information and data available. Three 2 hour long workshops will teach students the basic of quantitative text analysis, machine learning and data visualisation approaches in statistic software R and will particularly cover the quanteda package.
The workshops will be led by two leading junior scholars in the field of quantitative text analysis, Stefan Müller (University College Dublin) and Theresa Gessler (University of Zurich). The first of the online workshops will provide a basic introduction to the concepts underlying and tools for performing quantitative on Nov 4. The second workshop will present an overview of approaches in R for visualizing data with a particular emphasis on the output of content analyses and the final workshop will cover both unsupervised and supervised tools for analysing textual data from a machine learning approach.
These practical, hands on workshops assume students hold a basic background in R. For those requiring support in R, Dr Jun Sudduth (University of Strathclyde) will offer an introduction to R pre-workshop the day before the first session. The three workshops will be held from 10:00-12:00 on consecutive Weds, Nov 4, 11 and 18. The workshop facilitator, Dr Greene will follow up all sessions with an open Zoom session for discussion of practical questions and applications to individuals’ research topics led by Strathclyde tutors.
Students registering for this event should have some basic familiarity with quantitative methods and regression techniques.