Digital Text as Data – A Computational Approach

A deeply digitalized social world has brought studies of media to an “Age of Data Abundance,” which comes with its own opportunities and challenges. For a new generation of scholars, proper methodological tools are indispensable if they want to harvest the opportunities while facing up to the challenges of the digital age. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to a computational approach to collect, analyze, and visualize digital text as data. In the first part of the workshop, they will learn about how computational methods may complement, advance, and transcend traditional ways of studying media through cases. In the second part, they will get a chance to do hands-on exercises and play with R, a programming language widely used by social scientists, to collect and/or analyze some social media data.

When? February 15th, 10:00-12:00 PM EST

Where? Milieux Resource Room (EV. 11.705)

Dr. Zhifan Luo is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University. She obtained a doctoral degree in sociology from the State University of New York at Albany, the U.S. Her research and teaching integrate computer-assisted content analysis with traditional qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the dynamics of power and resistance in the authoritarian and democratic contexts. Her work has appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (2nd edition), and others.