Today it is quite common for people to exchange hundreds of comments in online conversations (e.g., blogs). Often, it can be very difficult to analyze and gain insights from such long conversations. ...To address this problem, we present a visual text analytic system that tightly integrates interactive visualization with novel text mining and summarization techniques to fulfill information needs of users in exploring conversations. At first, we perform a user requirement analysis for the domain of blog conversations to derive a set of design principles. Following these principles, we present an interface that visualizes a combination of various metadata and textual analysis results, supporting the user to interactively explore the blog conversations. We conclude with an informal user evaluation, which provides anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of our system and directions for further design.
The amount of digital text available for analysis by consumer researchers has risen dramatically. Consumer discussions on the internet, product reviews, and digital archives of news articles and ...press releases are just a few potential sources for insights about consumer attitudes, interaction, and culture. Drawing from linguistic theory and methods, this article presents an overview of automated text analysis, providing integration of linguistic theory with constructs commonly used in consumer research, guidance for choosing amongst methods, and advice for resolving sampling and statistical issues unique to text analysis. We argue that although automated text analysis cannot be used to study all phenomena, it is a useful tool for examining patterns in text that neither researchers nor consumers can detect unaided. Text analysis can be used to examine psychological and sociological constructs in consumer-produced digital text by enabling discovery or by providing ecological validity.
Theory-driven text analysis has made extensive use of psychological concept dictionaries, leading to a wide range of important results. These dictionaries have generally been applied through word ...count methods which have proven to be both simple and effective. In this paper, we introduce Distributed Dictionary Representations (DDR), a method that applies psychological dictionaries using semantic similarity rather than word counts. This allows for the measurement of the similarity between dictionaries and spans of text ranging from complete documents to individual words. We show how DDR enables dictionary authors to place greater emphasis on construct validity without sacrificing linguistic coverage. We further demonstrate the benefits of DDR on two real-world tasks and finally conduct an extensive study of the interaction between dictionary size and task performance. These studies allow us to examine how DDR and word count methods complement one another as tools for applying concept dictionaries and where each is best applied. Finally, we provide references to tools and resources to make this method both available and accessible to a broad psychological audience.
Populism is a relevant but contested concept in political communication research. It has been well-researched in political manifestos and the mass media. The present study focuses on another part of ...the hybrid media system and explores how politicians in four countries (AT, CH, IT, UK) use Facebook and Twitter for populist purposes. Five key elements of populism are derived from the literature: emphasizing the sovereignty of the people, advocating for the people, attacking the elite, ostracizing others, and invoking the 'heartland'. A qualitative text analysis reveals that populism manifests itself in a fragmented form on social media. Populist statements can be found across countries, parties, and politicians' status levels. While a broad range of politicians advocate for the people, attacks on the economic elite are preferred by left-wing populists. Attacks on the media elite and ostracism of others, however, are predominantly conducted by right-wing speakers. Overall, the paper provides an in-depth analysis of populism on social media. It shows that social media give the populist actors the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their messages. The paper also contributes to a refined conceptualization and measurement of populism in future studies.
Language can provide important insights into people, and culture more generally. Further, the digitization of information has made more and more textual data available. But by itself, all that data ...are just that: data. Realizing its potential requires turning that data into insight. We suggest that automated text analysis can help. Recent advances have provided novel and increasingly accessible ways to extract insight from text. While some psychologists may be familiar with dictionary methods, fewer may be aware of approaches like topic modeling, word embeddings, and more advanced neural network language models. This article provides an overview of natural language processing and how it can be used to deepen understanding of people and culture. We outline the dual role of language (i.e., reflecting things about producers and impacting audiences), review some useful text analysis methods, and discuss how these approaches can help unlock a range of interesting questions.
Public Significance Statement
This article offers an integrative discussion of how automated text analysis can be used to shed light on people and culture. It reviews recent methods and explains how they can be applied by nonspecialists to answer a range of research questions.
El presente artículo se propone como objetivo desarrollar un análisis con perspectiva de la desigualdad de género en el cuento “Pequeñas mujercitas”, de la escritora ecuatoriana Solange Rodríguez ...Pappe, el cual se incluye en la obra literaria La bondad de los extraños (2014), en el contexto de la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas del siglo XXI. La metodología por emplear es el análisis textual, para evidenciar cómo el elemento fantástico y sobrenatural se enfrenta entre las pequeñas mujercitas y Joaquín. En relación con el análisis y los resultados, se concluye que en el contexto narrativo se evidencia el desenvolvimiento de una relación explorativa-colonizadora del cuerpo masculino en un locus misógino y ambiguo en el que la subversión femenina se contrapone a la dominación masculina.
Existing studies focusing on politicians' adoption of Twitter have found that they use it primarily as a broadcasting tool. We argue that citizens' impolite and/or uncivil behavior is one possible ...explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with harassment and politicians are a prime target. This alters the incentive structure of engaging in dialogue on social media. We use Spanish, Greek, German, and U.K. candidates' tweets sent during the run‐up to the recent European Parliament elections, and rely on automated text analysis and machine learning methods to measure their level of civility. Our contribution is an actor‐oriented theory of political dialogue that incorporates Twitter's specific affordances, clarifying how and why Twitter's democratic promise may be limited.
The interpretation of literary texts still hold a pivotal role in the practice of university and secondary literary education, thus in the case of text analysis in educational situation one of the ...most important responsibilities of the teacher is to improve the interpretative skills of students. My paper undertakes two important tasks in this context. Based upon my experiences with my text analysis seminar course for first-year university students I examine, on the one hand, the fixed patterns with which the amateur interpreter tries to overcome the difficulties of interpretation, which tend to hinder rather than support the dialogue about the text. On the other hand, because it is impossible to create an interpretational formula for all literary works, my most important aim is to introduce how a possible model of interpretation is produced in the process, which can serve as a means for amateur interpreters to overcome the more difficult parts of a dialogue. In both cases I use Zoltán Ambrus’s short story titled “Ninive pusztulása” (“The Demise of Nineveh”) (1892) and its student interpretations from the past decade.
Editors’ Comment Mustillo, Sarah A.; Lizardo, Omar A.; McVeigh, Rory M.
American sociological review,
12/2018, Letnik:
83, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the three years we have been editing ASR, we have been impressed with the methodological breadth and depth of the submissions to the journal. Among the subset of papers that use primarily ...quantitative analytic strategies, an equally impressive range of methods and techniques is on display. The field has come a long way since any of the three of us were in graduate school and, indeed, many of the articles we have published in our role as editors represent the forefront of sophistication in techniques as varied as fixed and random effects on the one end to web scraping and text analysis on the other end. In this editorial, we would like to focus on a set of issues that seem to come up repeatedly in the thousands of papers we have read. These are not errors per se, but fall in the category of gaps or lags between previously accepted practices among quantitative scholars in sociology and the state of the art consensus among quantitative methodologists. These issues happen with such frequency that we feel compelled to offer some recommendations for future ASR submissions.
stm : An R Package for Structural Topic Models Roberts, Margaret E.; Stewart, Brandon M.; Tingley, Dustin
Journal of statistical software,
10/2019, Letnik:
91, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper demonstrates how to use the R package stm for structural topic modeling. The structural topic model allows researchers to flexibly estimate a topic model that includes document-level ...metadata. Estimation is accomplished through a fast variational approximation. The stm package provides many useful features, including rich ways to explore topics, estimate uncertainty, and visualize quantities of interest.
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