Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics

Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics

Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis of textual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the social sciences. For comparative politics, scholars who are often interested in non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, these advances may be difficult to a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political analysis Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 254 - 277
Main Authors: Lucas, Christopher, Nielsen, Richard A., Roberts, Margaret E., Stewart, Brandon M., Storer, Alex, Tingley, Dustin
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, US Cambridge University Press 01-04-2015
Oxford University Press
Subjects:
Data analysis
Linguistics
Open source software
Social sciences
Software packages
Translations
Online Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary:Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis of textual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the social sciences. For comparative politics, scholars who are often interested in non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, these advances may be difficult to access. This article discusses practical issues that arise in the processing, management, translation, and analysis of textual data with a particular focus on how procedures differ across languages. These procedures are combined in two applied examples of automated text analysis using the recently introduced Structural Topic Model. We also show how the model can be used to analyze data that have been translated into a single language via machine translation tools. All the methods we describe here are implemented in open-source software packages available from the authors.
ISSN:1047-1987
1476-4989
DOI:10.1093/pan/mpu019