Hosted jointly by the Public Policy Institute and Compass, on 24 January 2019.
Following nearly two decades of applied text analytics for social science and ten years actively developing analytic software for text analysis, this talk represents my top ten list of “If only I knew then what I know now” lessons. It includes the epistemology of text analysis, some very practical issues about getting started, some illustrations of pitfalls to avoid, reasons both to embrace and to be wary of open source software, and career issues about developing community projects.
Kenneth Benoit is currently Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Benoit was Principal Investigator in the creation of the Quanteda Initiative, a UK non-profit organisation devoted to the promotion of open-source text analysis software. Quanteda supports active development of these tools, in addition to providing training materials, training events, and sponsoring workshops and conferences.
