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“ChatGPT can give entirely wrong answers and present misinformation as fact, writing plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”, The Guardian. “ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs”, Insider. Due to the large availability of text-data from websites and social networks, text generative models and automated text analysis have become increasingly popular over the last years, spurring the interest (and skepticism) of scholars from different disciplines. Automated text analysis and text generative models are promising approaches for analyzing large databases of social and political texts. Text databases have been used to infer political behavior, policy preferences, predict electoral outcomes, or generate plausible-sounding texts (ChatGBT). This course introduces a variety of automated text analysis tools and models, presenting their applications in social research and demystifying what they can, but most importantly, what they cannot do (yet). |
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The course combines :
Some basic knowledge of R is required (or having completed the “Fundamentals of R” workshop). The coding session will be hands-on, dealing with practical issues occurring in research such as: collecting and pre-processing text data, interpreting, validating and visualizing the outputs of an analysis).
Learning Objectives:
Students will learn how to collect, prepare and process text-as-data in R; based on the research question, identify and apply the most appropriate text analytical tool to describe text databases (wordcloud, word distributions); identify and apply the most appropriate text analysis model to infer causal relationships between variables of interest (i.e. topic models).
Valentina Baiamonte has a PhD in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute. In her Ph.D thesis, she analysed a database of 218 position papers submitted by interest groups during a EU consultation on energy and climate change, to assess the diversity of the EU consultation process. She currently works at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) managing projects on ESG-related risks and disclosure. She is also a freelance consultant and passionate geek during her spare time.
PhD students of the Graduate Institute will be informed of each workshop by email. For any questions regarding registration to the workshop, please contact: emma.cranfield@graduateinstitute.ch