Workshop Series

Feb. 23–March 16, 2011

Organizer:

• Matthew Gentzkow, University of Chicago
  

This special four-week workshop series brought together researchers from a variety of disciplines in an emerging area—the use of automated analysis of texts to address questions in the social sciences.

Researchers today have at their disposal powerful computational tools that can analyze vast repositories of digital content to track the occurrence of words or topics of interest. Scholars are mining newspapers, legal and governmental texts, digitized books, and a wide range of other sources for insights about politics, finance, accounting, and the evolution of culture and language.

These workshops illustrated both cutting-edge methods and applications, at a level accessible to audience members from different fields.

Scheduled workshop speakers and their fields included:

Feb. 23	“Discovering Concepts” Justin Grimmer, Stanford University and Visiting Fellow Political science 1:20–2:50 p.m., Harper Center Room 3B
March 1	“Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books ” Erez Lieberman-Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel Harvard University 12–1:30 p.m., Harper Center Room C25 Lunch will be served; registration required.
March 2	“Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Tracing Changes in Framing Issues in Political Speeches” Eyal Sagi, Northwestern University 1:20–2:50 p.m., Harper Center Room 3B
March 9	“How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs” Kevin Quinn, University of California Berkeley 1:20–2:50 p.m., Harper Center Room 3B
March 15	“Sentiment Mining” Matthew Taddy, University of Chicago 12–130 p.m., Harper Center Room C25 Lunch will be served; registration required.
March 16	Hanna Wallach, University of Massachusetts Computer science 1:20–2:50 p.m., Harper Center Room 3B