Annual Review of Political Science· 2017Q1· Review
Large-Scale Computerized Text Analysis in Political Science: Opportunities and Challenges
- 301citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2017year
Short summary
Computerized text analysis is becoming mainstream in political science, enabling researchers to quantitatively investigate vast amounts of text data from sources like the internet.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Political science is increasingly using text-as-data approaches to analyze large volumes of textual information.
- The internet and accessible software packages have democratized quantitative text analysis for researchers.
- Scholars are now tapping new data sources and employing a wider range of methods.
- Topic model instability is identified as a significant methodological challenge in this field.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Text has always been an important data source in political science. What has changed in recent years is the feasibility of investigating large amounts of text quantitatively. The internet provides political scientists with more data than their mentors could have imagined, and the research community is providing accessible text analysis software packages, along with training and support. As a result, text-as-data research is becoming mainstream in political science. Scholars are tapping new data sources, they are employing more diverse methods, and they are becoming critical consumers of findings based on those methods. In this article, we first describe the four stages of a typical text-as-data project. We then review recent political science applications and explore one important methodological challenge—topic model instability—in greater detail.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Annual Review of Political Science, 2017 · DOI ↗
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Field: General Social Sciences
General Social SciencesSocial Sciences