Computational Textual Analysis for Communication Research

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to computational methods in textual analysis, specifically designed for those in the field of communication research. This course is practical and hands-on in nature and focuses on theoretical and empirical questions we can ask with text-as-data from a social science perspective and learn how to answer them. The course content covers data scraping, text data cleaning and preprocessing, dictionary-based analysis, unsupervised topic modeling, supervised text classification, the use of large language models, and techniques for effective visualization and reporting of findings. To follow this course, basic Python and R knowledge would be beneficial, but advanced programming skills are not required.