Janet Salmons Janet Salmons

Swahili Lexicon for Sentiment Analysis

The "Swahili Lexicon for Sentiment Analysis" project, funded by a Sage Concept Grant, aims to develop and test a Swahili Lexicon annotated by native Swahili speakers for text mining, particularly sentiment analysis.  

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Skills, Data Analysis, Data Collection Chris Burnage Skills, Data Analysis, Data Collection Chris Burnage

My journey into text mining

My journey into text mining started when the institute of Digital Humanities (DH) at the University of Leipzig invited students from other disciplines to take part in their introductory course. I was enrolled in a sociology degree at the time, and this component of data science was not part of the classic curriculum; however, I could explore other departments through course electives and the DH course sounded like the perfect fit.

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Tools & Technology Heather Estop Tools & Technology Heather Estop

SAGE Concept Grants: Feedback for applicants

The 2020 SAGE Ocean Concept Grant program drew over 140 applications from all over the world. In this blog post, we’re giving you an insight into our judging criteria and sharing the most common reasons why applications did not progress further, to serve as feedback for this year’s applicants and guidance for future applicants.

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Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Chris Burnage Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Chris Burnage

From preprocessing to text analysis: 80 tools for mining unstructured data

Text mining techniques have become critical for social scientists working with large scale social data, be it Twitter collections to track polarization, party documents to understand opinions and ideology, or news corpora to study the spread of misinformation. In the infographic shown in this blog, we identify more than 80 different apps, software packages, and libraries for R, Python and MATLAB that are used by social science researchers at different stages in their text analysis project. We focused almost entirely on statistical, quantitative and computational analysis of text, although some of these tools could be used to explore texts for qualitative purposes.

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The ethics of AI and working with data at scale: what are the experts saying

If we were to do a text mining exercise on all the incredible discussions at last week’s conference 100+ Brilliant Women in AI & Ethics, education would beat all other topics by a mile. We talked about educating kids, we had teenagers share their thoughts on AI in poems and essays, and exchanged views on the nuances of teaching ethics in computing and working with large volumes of social data both for computer scientists and experts from other disciplines. 

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Making sensitive text data accessible for computational social science

Text is everywhere, and everything is text. More textual data than ever before are available to computational social scientists—be it in the form of digitized books, communication traces on social media platforms, or digital scientific articles. Researchers in academia and industry increasingly use text data to understand human behavior and to measure patterns in language. Techniques from natural language processing have created a fertile soil to perform these tasks and to make inferences based on text data on a large scale.

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Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Heather Estop Tools & Technology, Data Analysis Heather Estop

Roundup: #text2data - new ways of reading

‘From text to data - new ways of reading’ was a 2-day event organised by the National Library of Sweden, the National Archives and Swe-Clarin. The conference brought together librarians, digital collection curators, and scholars in digital humanities and computational social science to talk about the tools and challenges involved in large scale text collection and analysis.

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