quanteda

Introduction

In the penultimate post of this series, we’ll use some unsupervised learning approaches to uncover comment clusters and latent themes among the comments to President Ryan’s Ours to Shape website.

The full code to recreate the analysis in the blog posts is available on GitHub.

Introduction

We're still analyzing the comments submitted to President Ryan’s Ours to Shape website.

In the fourth installment of this series (we’re almost done, I promise), we’ll look at the sentiment – aka positive-negative tone, polarity, affect – of the comments to President Ryan’s Ours to Shape website.

Introduction

To recap, we’re exploring the comments submitted to President Ryan’s Ours to Shape website (as of December 7, 2018).

Introduction

In the last post, we began exploring the comments submitted to the Ours to Shape website. We looked at the distribution across categories and contributors, the length and readability of the comments, and a few key words in context. While I did more exploration of the data than reported, the first post gives a taste of the kind of dive into the data that usefully proceeds analysis.

Introduction

As part of a series of workshops on quantitative analysis of text this fall, I started examining the comments submitted to President Ryan’s Ours to Shape website. The site invites people to share their ideas and insights for UVA going forward, particularly in the domains of service, discovery, and community.

A lot of introductory tutorials to quanteda assume that the reader has some base of knowledge about the program's functionality or how it might be used. Other tutorials assume that the user is an expert in R and on what goes on under the hood when you're coding. This introductory guide will assume none of that. Instead, I'm presuming a very basic understanding of R (like how to assign variables) and that you've just heard of quanteda for the first time today.

I'm still looking at the rhetoric from the presidential debates, this time focusing on the first general election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

I'm teaching a Text as Data short course (using R) right now, and as a card-carrying political scientist, I couldn't resist using the ongoing campaign as an example (this was, in part, a way of handling my own anxiety about last Monday's debate---this is what I was doing while watching). So here goes...