Weekly Learning Goals
Understand the basic goals and methodologies associated with text analysis.
Get the big picture of the Digital Text Analysis process and phases that will inform the structure of the course and projects.
Critically reflect on the limitations of a quantitative analysis of textual data.
Understand fundamental research design questions and data selection/sampling
This reading gives an introductory overview of different approaches in which digital text analysis can be applied in conjunction with other research methods. I suggest that every time the text mentions "social sciences," you think of "liberal arts," as we will always be looking to broaden the application horizon of our discussions and topics to all the liberal arts offered at Bowdoin. Don't worry about the details of each method at this point since we will deep dive into some of them and explore some fundamental concepts in our class conversations.
Please, respond to these prompts in preparation for our in-class discussions. The fundamental idea of these formative assessments is to bring to your attention critical points of our weekly pedagogical plan and connect readings to classes.
Since we haven't had time to go through it in class, I would ask if you could fill this form out before our Monday Class.
This text gives an overview of the planning phase of the Digital Text Analysis research project. In class we will bring the pedagogical approach of the text to the reality of our projects which are usually more complex and fuzzy than well thought-out taxonomies can capture. Please, focus on the key questions you have to answer in the planning phase to develop a consistent data gathering plan and research questions. And fear not, we will go through some of the key technical terms in our discussion next class.
Please, work on these data selection experiment in preparation for our next class.
