Spring 2022 Workshop: 30th March
Multilingual Automated Text Analysis for Comparative Social Science Research
Wednesday, 30 March, 14:00–16:00 (GMT)
You can register for the event (opens in a new window)here.
Participation is free of charge, and the workshop will take place on Zoom.
Details: Automated text analysis methods have become popular in computational social science. They appeal as they promise the automated extraction of meaning from large numbers of documents, thus allowing to better understand the contents and, indirectly, the document creators and audiences. While the existing techniques are well established for English-language text, the situation is different when it comes to the study of text in more than one language and in languages other than English. Yet it is precisely these multilingual techniques that are needed for (country) comparative research designs. This workshop will start to motivate the need for comparative social science studies that base their interpretations on text data. The main part will provide guidance and many practical tips to help plan such research designs. In particular, it will cover considerations related to the definition of comparative research goals, the selection of a case comparative text data set, the definition of concepts, and the creation of a human annotated validation baseline. The workshop will then focus on methodological strategies that can be employed to obtain measurements from a multilingual corpus with automated text analysis methods. All steps will be illustrated with an applied example. The workshop materials, including slides and scripts, will be made available on GitHub.
About the instructor: (opens in a new window)Fabienne Lind is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. Her dissertation (defended June 2021) deals with methods of automated multilingual text analysis for comparative research. As project manager of the H2020 project OPTED, she is collaborating with researchers from 17 research institutions to develop an infrastructure that will serve as a major hub for political text analysis in Europe.