Master of International Affairs   Master of Public Policy   Master of Data Science for Public Policy  

Text as data

There is an abundance of unstructured data around us. Working with text is key, not just to measure discussions and opinions on social media or in product reviews, but also to gain insights into concepts important to the study of politics such as ideological positions or policy sentiments. The vast amount of textual data that one frequently needs to process and the messy form that it often comes in poses special challenges to researchers. This course introduces students to computational tools and methods that enable them to treat text as data. We will touch upon core theoretical concepts, but the main goal is to give you hands-on experience in using R to collect, load, prepare and analyse text data.

This course is for 2nd year MIA, MPP and MDS students only.