Anotace
This is a guest course taught in the summer semester 2019 by Dr. Christian Rauh from the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, one of the prime European scholars in the field of automated text analysis in the realm of international politics.
Politics takes place in and through texts. Speeches, debates, position papers, press releases, traditional and social media coverage, as well as the resulting laws, agreements, or resolutions can tell us much on the priorities, preferences, and power of political actors. This holds especially for politics beyond the nation state. For studying international politics across long time periods or broad actor sets, political text is often the only consistently available information source that we have. The challenge, however, lies in extracting systematic information from largely unstructured texts in a reliable and systematic fashion. This is a promise of automated content analyses: various algorithms offer means to reveal relevant patterns in the vast amount of political language that we can nowadays access in digital formats.
The block seminar thus introduces the strengths but also the limitations of various approaches to treat text as data. Based on Dr. Rauh’s own work with and on these tools, students will learn about the basic intuitions behind the most prominent text analysis methods in recent political science research. They will work along concrete examples by discussing extant and possible applications of these methods to EU and international politics.
See the attached course syllabus for more information. Feel free to get in touch with Dr. Rauh (christian.rauh@wzb.eu) or Dr. Michal Parízek (course guarantor) with specific questions about the course.
The course takes place on May 7, May 9, and May 10, always in blocks of 80+80 minutes.