Sociology 216TX - Special Topics in Sociology: 'Text as Data I: From Qualitative to Quantitative Text Analysis'

Characterizing, categorizing, and counting text documents is at the heart of research and knowledge development in the social sciences and humanities. New digital technologies have introduced new methods for analyzing text documents on a massive scale. These computational approaches have also provoked important debates about the role of meaning, context, and reproducibility in social science research. This course considers the affordances of new digital methods for text analysis in relation to established practices of qualitative coding. Students will explore this new frontier in a hands-on manner using Python to count and compare relevant features of text documents in large data sets.

Prereq: SOCI-123 or COMSC-151.