Harvard Symposium on Applied Computational Text Analysis

May 2, 2018
ACTA
The Harvard Symposium on Applied Computational Text Analysis will bring together a group of sociologists who are carrying out cutting-edge research with text analysis methods, and doing so in the service of theoretically and substantively important research questions. As the use of computational approaches has matured in the discipline, the time is ripe to showcase this kind of work. The goals of the event are twofold: (1) to generate dialogue between practitioners of text analysis and share insights about how these approaches can help sociologists answer old questions more effectively—and potentially ask new questions that were out of reach with traditional data and methods; and (2) to demonstrate to scholars unfamiliar with this type of work the promise of automated text analysis (tempered by an understanding of these methods’ limitations). The paper presentations will span the substantive areas of economic, political, and cultural sociology, while a keynote address by Professor Gary King will consider the future of computational methods in the social sciences more broadly.
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