The Department of Sociology and Legal Studies presents this workshop as part of their Transnational series, featuring Dr. Gabe Ignatow, North Texas University.
Text mining is a form of data mining that involves collection and analysis of 'unstructured' textual data, mainly from online sources such as social media, news, and streaming video platforms. As an alternative to survey methods, text mining has a number of advantages. But it also requires new ways of designing research projects, connecting theory and methods, and sampling. In this talk I provide an overview of the software tools and methods available for text mining. The focus of the talk is on research design, but I also cover some of the ethical, philosophical, and pedagogical implications of text mining and related digital social research methods.
Gabe Ignatow is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His research interests are in sociological theory, digital research methods, cognitive social science and philosophy of social science. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Forum and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. Along with two recent books on text mining co-authored with Rada Mihalcea, Gabe has co-authored a forthcoming volume on digital social research methods and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. He is currently working on a sociological theory monograph while serving as his department's graduate program director.
The Transnational Talks series is a new Department of Sociology and Legal Studies initiative supported by Waterloo International, which aims to foster international collaboration and enhance methods training and exposure among faculty and students.