Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists


Book Description

Text is everywhere, and it is a fantastic resource for social scientists. However, because it is so abundant, and because language is so variable, it is often difficult to extract the information we want. There is a whole subfield of AI concerned with text analysis (natural language processing). Many of the basic analysis methods developed are now readily available as Python implementations. This Element will teach you when to use which method, the mathematical background of how it works, and the Python code to implement it.




Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists


Book Description

Text contains a wealth of information about about a wide variety of sociocultural constructs. Automated prediction methods can infer these quantities (sentiment analysis is probably the most well-known application). However, there is virtually no limit to the kinds of things we can predict from text: power, trust, misogyny, are all signaled in language. These algorithms easily scale to corpus sizes infeasible for manual analysis. Prediction algorithms have become steadily more powerful, especially with the advent of neural network methods. However, applying these techniques usually requires profound programming knowledge and machine learning expertise. As a result, many social scientists do not apply them. This Element provides the working social scientist with an overview of the most common methods for text classification, an intuition of their applicability, and Python code to execute them. It covers both the ethical foundations of such work as well as the emerging potential of neural network methods.




Programming with Python for Social Scientists


Book Description

As data become ′big′, fast and complex, the software and computing tools needed to manage and analyse them are rapidly developing. Social scientists need new tools to meet these challenges, tackle big datasets, while also developing a more nuanced understanding of - and control over - how these computing tools and algorithms are implemented. Programming with Python for Social Scientists offers a vital foundation to one of the most popular programming tools in computer science, specifically for social science researchers, assuming no prior coding knowledge. It guides you through the full research process, from question to publication, including: the fundamentals of why and how to do your own programming in social scientific research, questions of ethics and research design, a clear, easy to follow ′how-to′ guide to using Python, with a wide array of applications such as data visualisation, social media data research, social network analysis, and more. Accompanied by numerous code examples, screenshots, sample data sources, this is the textbook for social scientists looking for a complete introduction to programming with Python and incorporating it into their research design and analysis.




Applied Text Analysis with Python


Book Description

From news and speeches to informal chatter on social media, natural language is one of the richest and most underutilized sources of data. Not only does it come in a constant stream, always changing and adapting in context; it also contains information that is not conveyed by traditional data sources. The key to unlocking natural language is through the creative application of text analytics. This practical book presents a data scientist’s approach to building language-aware products with applied machine learning. You’ll learn robust, repeatable, and scalable techniques for text analysis with Python, including contextual and linguistic feature engineering, vectorization, classification, topic modeling, entity resolution, graph analysis, and visual steering. By the end of the book, you’ll be equipped with practical methods to solve any number of complex real-world problems. Preprocess and vectorize text into high-dimensional feature representations Perform document classification and topic modeling Steer the model selection process with visual diagnostics Extract key phrases, named entities, and graph structures to reason about data in text Build a dialog framework to enable chatbots and language-driven interaction Use Spark to scale processing power and neural networks to scale model complexity




Text Analysis with R


Book Description

Now in its second edition, Text Analysis with R provides a practical introduction to computational text analysis using the open source programming language R. R is an extremely popular programming language, used throughout the sciences; due to its accessibility, R is now used increasingly in other research areas. In this volume, readers immediately begin working with text, and each chapter examines a new technique or process, allowing readers to obtain a broad exposure to core R procedures and a fundamental understanding of the possibilities of computational text analysis at both the micro and the macro scale. Each chapter builds on its predecessor as readers move from small scale “microanalysis” of single texts to large scale “macroanalysis” of text corpora, and each concludes with a set of practice exercises that reinforce and expand upon the chapter lessons. The book’s focus is on making the technical palatable and making the technical useful and immediately gratifying. Text Analysis with R is written with students and scholars of literature in mind but will be applicable to other humanists and social scientists wishing to extend their methodological toolkit to include quantitative and computational approaches to the study of text. Computation provides access to information in text that readers simply cannot gather using traditional qualitative methods of close reading and human synthesis. This new edition features two new chapters: one that introduces dplyr and tidyr in the context of parsing and analyzing dramatic texts to extract speaker and receiver data, and one on sentiment analysis using the syuzhet package. It is also filled with updated material in every chapter to integrate new developments in the field, current practices in R style, and the use of more efficient algorithms.




Data Analysis for Social Science


Book Description

"Data analysis has become a necessary skill across the social sciences, and recent advancements in computing power have made knowledge of programming an essential component. Yet most data science books are intimidating and overwhelming to a non-specialist audience, including most undergraduates. This book will be a shorter, more focused and accessible version of Kosuke Imai's Quantitative Social Science book, which was published by Princeton in 2018 and has been adopted widely in graduate level courses of the same title. This book uses the same innovative approach as Quantitative Social Science , using real data and 'R' to answer a wide range of social science questions. It assumes no prior knowledge of statistics or coding. It starts with straightforward, simple data analysis and culminates with multivariate linear regression models, focusing more on the intuition of how the math works rather than the math itself. The book makes extensive use of data visualizations, diagrams, pictures, cartoons, etc., to help students understand and recall complex concepts, provides an easy to follow, step-by-step template of how to conduct data analysis from beginning to end, and will be accompanied by supplemental materials in the appendix and online for both students and instructors"--




Text Mining


Book Description

Online communities generate massive volumes of natural language data and the social sciences continue to learn how to best make use of this new information and the technology available for analyzing it. Text Mining brings together a broad range of contemporary qualitative and quantitative methods to provide strategic and practical guidance on analyzing large text collections. This accessible book, written by a sociologist and a computer scientist, surveys the fast-changing landscape of data sources, programming languages, software packages, and methods of analysis available today. Suitable for novice and experienced researchers alike, the book will help readers use text mining techniques more efficiently and productively.




Quantitative Social Science


Book Description

"Princeton University Press published Imai's textbook, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction, an introduction to quantitative methods and data science for upper level undergrads and graduates in professional programs, in February 2017. What is distinct about the book is how it leads students through a series of applied examples of statistical methods, drawing on real examples from social science research. The original book was prepared with the statistical software R, which is freely available online and has gained in popularity in recent years. But many existing courses in statistics and data sciences, particularly in some subject areas like sociology and law, use STATA, another general purpose package that has been the market leader since the 1980s. We've had several requests for STATA versions of the text as many programs use it by default. This is a "translation" of the original text, keeping all the current pedagogical text but inserting the necessary code and outputs from STATA in their place"--




Big Data and Social Science


Book Description

Both Traditional Students and Working Professionals Acquire the Skills to Analyze Social Problems. Big Data and Social Science: A Practical Guide to Methods and Tools shows how to apply data science to real-world problems in both research and the practice. The book provides practical guidance on combining methods and tools from computer science, statistics, and social science. This concrete approach is illustrated throughout using an important national problem, the quantitative study of innovation. The text draws on the expertise of prominent leaders in statistics, the social sciences, data science, and computer science to teach students how to use modern social science research principles as well as the best analytical and computational tools. It uses a real-world challenge to introduce how these tools are used to identify and capture appropriate data, apply data science models and tools to that data, and recognize and respond to data errors and limitations. For more information, including sample chapters and news, please visit the author's website.




Mastering Social Media Mining with Python


Book Description

Acquire and analyze data from all corners of the social web with Python About This Book Make sense of highly unstructured social media data with the help of the insightful use cases provided in this guide Use this easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to apply analytics to complicated and messy social data This is your one-stop solution to fetching, storing, analyzing, and visualizing social media data Who This Book Is For This book is for intermediate Python developers who want to engage with the use of public APIs to collect data from social media platforms and perform statistical analysis in order to produce useful insights from data. The book assumes a basic understanding of the Python Standard Library and provides practical examples to guide you toward the creation of your data analysis project based on social data. What You Will Learn Interact with a social media platform via their public API with Python Store social data in a convenient format for data analysis Slice and dice social data using Python tools for data science Apply text analytics techniques to understand what people are talking about on social media Apply advanced statistical and analytical techniques to produce useful insights from data Build beautiful visualizations with web technologies to explore data and present data products In Detail Your social media is filled with a wealth of hidden data – unlock it with the power of Python. Transform your understanding of your clients and customers when you use Python to solve the problems of understanding consumer behavior and turning raw data into actionable customer insights. This book will help you acquire and analyze data from leading social media sites. It will show you how to employ scientific Python tools to mine popular social websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and more. Explore the Python libraries used for social media mining, and get the tips, tricks, and insider insight you need to make the most of them. Discover how to develop data mining tools that use a social media API, and how to create your own data analysis projects using Python for clear insight from your social data. Style and approach This practical, hands-on guide will help you learn everything you need to perform data mining for social media. Throughout the book, we take an example-oriented approach to use Python for data analysis and provide useful tips and tricks that you can use in day-to-day tasks.