New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data Workshop (2013)

New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data Workshop (2013)

Schedule: Version 26 September  2013

London School of Economics and Political Science

Friday, September 27, 2012, 8:30 – Saturday, September 28, 2012, 17:00

For registered participants only

Venue: New Academic Building, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, lower level room NAB.LG.03

Part of an annual event jointly sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and the Ford Center for Global Citizenship at Northwestern University, this year’s event will take place in London, hosted by the Department of Methodology of the LSE.  These conferences are co-organized by Ken Benoit (PI on the QUANTESS [Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data for Social Sciences] project at LSE), Daniel Diermeier (two previous conferences at Kellogg), and Arthur Spirling (“New Directions in Text Analysis” at Harvard).  Last year this conference took place at Harvard, and next year is scheduled to take place at Kellogg.

FRIDAY

BREAKFAST, COFFEE AND REGISTRATION (Friday, 8:30-9:00)

OPENING REMARKS: Ken Benoit (9:00-9:15)

1) POLICY ANALYSIS FROM TEXTUAL DATA (9:15-10:45AM)

• “ Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes,” Benjamin Lauderdale.

• “ The Evolution of the Security Dilemma in US-China Relations,” Erin Baggott.

Discussants: Justin Gross and Will Lowe

COFFEE BREAK (10:45-11:00AM)

2) EFFECTS FROM TEXTS (11:00-12:30PM)

• “ Judicial Identity and the Written Word: Evidence From Causal Text Analysis,” Michael Gill and Andrew B. Hall.

• “ Analysis of Causal Topics in Text Data and Time Series with Applications to Presidential Prediction Markets,” Hyun Duk Kim, ChengXiang Zhai, Thomas A. Rietz, Daniel Diermeier, Meichun Hsu, Malu Castellanos, and Carlos Ceja.

Discussants: Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn

LUNCH (12:30-1:30PM)

3) NEW APPLICATIONS FOR OLD SCHOOL QUANTITATIVE CORPUS LINGUISTICS APPROACHES (1:30-3:00PM)

• “ Towards the automated measurement of deliberative communication.” Valentin Gold and Katharina Holzinger

• “ UK Press Portrayal of Migrant Groups: A Public-Facing Application of Quantitative Corpus Linguistic Analysis to Newspaper Texts,” (and more about the overall project here)  Scott Blinder and William Allen.

Discussants: Benjamin Lauderdale and Philip Resnik

**COFFEE BREAK **(3:00-3:30PM)

4) TRICK, OR TWEET? (3:30-5:00PM)

• “ Evolution of Political Discussion on Twitter – Ideology, Issues, and Events”, Pablo Barbara, Rich Bonneau, John Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Josh Tucker

• “ Predicting and Interpolating State-level polling using Twitter textual data”, Nick Beauchamp

Discussants: Andy Eggers and Noah Smith  

19:00-21:30 Participant Dinner (by invitation)****

SATURDAY

COFFEE (Saturday, 9:00-9:30AM)

5) MEDIA FRENZY (Saturday, 9:30-11:00AM)

• “ Taking Out the Trash: An Empirical Investigation of Strategic Timing of News Releases.” Greg Austin and Joseph Walsh.
• “ News Media: platform or power broker?  A study of political quotes in newspaper content using syntactic analysis.” Wouter van Atteveldt.

Discussants: Arthur Spirling and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

MORE COFFEE (11:00-11:15AM)

6) NAMED, FRAMED, AND TAMED (11:15-12:45)

• “ Identifying Media Frames and Frame Dynamics within and across Policy Issues,” Amber E. Boydstun, Justin H. Gross, Philip Resnik, Noah A. Smith

• “ Signals of Doubt: Harnessing the Power of Text-Mining to Understand Media Coverage of Climate Change,” Constantine Boussalis

Discussants: Paul Kellstedt and Justin Farrell.

LUNCH (12:45-13:30PM)

7) AND NOW FOR SOME COMPUTER SCIENCE APPROACHES (13:30-15:00)

• “ Measuring Ideological Proportions in Political Speeches,” Yanchuan Sim, Brice D. L. Acree,  Justin Gross, and Noah A. Smith. (And a political science version of this paper available here.)
•  “ Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Computational Approach,” John Wilkerson, David Smith, Nick Stramp, Jeremy Dashiell. John will also briefly describe the Poliinformatics project.

Discussants: Hanna Wallach and Ken Younge

COFFEE BREAK (15:00-15:15)

8) TOOLS AND METHODS ROUNDTABLE (15:15-17:00PM)

• “ Structural topic models for open-ended survey responses,” Brandon M. Stewart.
• “ Policy Miner: From Oysters to Pearls”, Hossein Rahmani and Christine Arnold.
• “ Corpus-Based Dictionaries for Sentiment Analysis of Specialized Vocabularies,” Doug Rice and Christopher Zorn.
• “ PiCloud: A Simple Approach to Cloud Computing,” Ken Younge.

(General audience reaction will replace discussants for this session.)

FOLLOWED BY DISCUSSIONS AT THE PUB

FULL LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

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  **Department/Institution**
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  Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis
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  Department of Methodology, LSE
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  Department of Govenment, Harvard University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Center for Empirical Research in the Law, Washington University
</td>

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  Department of Government, London School of Economics
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, Harvard University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, Harvard University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, London School of Economics
</td>

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  School of Law, Pennsylvania State University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Political Science, University of Maastricht
</td>

<td width="336">
  Harvard Law School
</td>

<td width="336">
  Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, London School of Economics
</td>

<td width="336">
  Law and Social Sciences, Nottingham University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, Harvard University
</td>

<td width="336">
  School of Computer Science, University of Massachussets
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, London School of Economics
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
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<td width="336">
  Carnegie Mellon University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Political Science Department, University of Washington
</td>

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  Department of Politics, New York University
</td>

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  Department of Political Science, University of Alabama
</td>

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  Department of Politics, New York University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Yale University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Political Science Department, University of Washington
</td>

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  Chair of International Relations and Conflict Management, Konstanz University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
</td>

<td width="336">
  Krannert School of Management, Purdue University
</td>

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  Data Editor, The Economist
</td>

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  School of Law, UC Berkeley
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Government, Harvard University
</td>

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  University of Milan
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Political Science, Northeastern University
</td>

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  Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University
</td>

<td width="336">
  School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Department of Politics at New York University
</td>

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  Political Science Department, Texas A&M University
</td>

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  Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
</td>

<td width="336">
  University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS)
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  Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Compas, Oxford University
</td>

<td width="336">
  London School of Economics
</td>

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  MZES, University of Mannheim
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<td width="336">
  Harvard Law School
</td>

<td width="336">
  Computer Science, Sheffield University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Chair of International Relations and Conflict Management, Konstanz University
</td>

<td width="336">
  MZES, University of Mannheim
</td>

<td width="336">
  Compas, Oxford University
</td>

<td width="336">
  Communication Science Department, VU University of Amsterdam
</td>