Week 1: Kenneth Benoit Trinity College, Dublin
Week 2: Will Lowe Maastricht University
The course surveys and characterizes methods for systematically extracting information from text for social scientific purposes, and teches students how to apply these methods in practical research. It takes as a starting point more traditional methods of content analysis, but is aimed at the most recent advances in quantitative content analysis that treat words as data to be analyzed using statistical tools.
The course surveys several of these methods, including document classification and scaling, but also applies the statistical framework to more traditional non-automated coding schemes such as the Comparative Manifesto Project. The course covers fundamental issues such as inter-coder agreement, reliability, validation, accuracy, and precision.
Lessons consist of a mixture of theoretical grounding in content analysis approaches and techniques and analysis of real texts using content analytic and statistical software.
We expect to run the course for a 4th time at the ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques in Ljubljana in 2011.
Some quotes from the 2009 course participants.
"Great instructors, great TA, great subject, great readings"
"The instructors and TA were dynamic and well-informed. They tried to tailor the course to meet the needs and research interests of participants. The course covered a lot of ground and really focused on giving us practical tools to use."
"The course shows the state of the art in quantitative text analysis. The readings give a good overview and the lectures give the necessary background."