Sociology 151 - Text As Data in the Digital Era

How can the social sciences benefit from remarkable advances in hardware and software that have unlocked new approaches to using text-as-data? This course interrogates the use of text-as-data from both social scientific and computational perspectives. We will consider how meaning is theorized, how coding practices have evolved, and how scale is achieved in the analysis of text by social scientists and computational experts. We will explore this new frontier in a hands-on manner; by the end of the course we will deploy machine learning models to gain insights from large bodies of text such that we may evaluate the utility of these approaches in our quest for insight into the social world.