Quantitative Text Analysis

Computational text analysis has become increasingly popular in political science. This Level 4 module introduces social science students to the quantitative analysis of textual data, in two complementary parts.

The first part covers classical quantitative text analysis approaches that prioritise interpretability and transparency: dictionary-based approaches, supervised document classification, scaling models, and topic modelling, implemented in R. The second part introduces state-of-the-art techniques that leverage large language models.

The module was first taught at the University of Zurich in 2019 and has run every spring at University College Dublin since 2022.

More information: UCD module page (opens in new tab).