Text

Readings

• Look through some of the chapters in Julia Silge and David Robinson, Tidy Text Mining¹ (but definitely don’t read them all! You just need to get a taste of what modern text analysis looks like.)
• A bunch of (really) short things:
  • Evangeline Reynolds, “Federalist Papers”
  • Julia Silge, “She Giggles, He Gallops”
  • Abby Ohlheiser, “These are the words most associated with men and women, according to Facebook status updates”
  • Six Ideas for Displaying Qualitative Data
  • Word clouds considered harmful
  • Word clouds cause death… or something
  • When It’s Ok to Use Word Clouds
  • The Class of 2011
  • Every time Ford and Kavanaugh dodged a question, in one chart
  • Tweet by @s_soroka

Questions to reflect on

(Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking.)

• Why is qualitative data difficult to visualize?
• Why are word clouds so problematic? When is (not) okay to use them?

Other resources

Check out this slide show demonstrating a bunch of different ways to visualize text, as well as this collection of 400+ different text visualization techniques (!!)

Slides

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

• Introduction
• Qualitative text-based data
• Crash course in computational linguistics

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Qualitative text-based data
• Crash course in computational linguistics

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: