7.1 Text as Data

• Many sources of text data for social scientists:

  • open ended survey responses, social media data, interview transcripts, electronic health records, news articles, official documents (laws, regulations, etc.), research publications, digital trace data, etc.

• even if data of interest does not exist in textual form (yet): tools of speech recognition and machine translation, crowdworkers, etc.

• previously: text data was often ignored, selectively read and used anecdotally or manually labeled by researchers

• now: wide variety of text analytical methods (supervised + unsupervised) and increasing adoption of these methods from social scientists