— with Dr. Douglas Parry (Stellenbosch University)
When: Thursday, November 30, 09:00 am – 5:00 pm (lunch break: 12:45 – 13:45 pm)
Where: WI (Flexroom), on-site only
This workshop offers a comprehensive introduction to text analysis using the R programming language. The workshop aims to equip participants with the essential skills to extract valuable insights from unstructured text data. Throughout the day, participants will learn practical techniques to pre-process text, perform sentiment analysis, uncover hidden topics through topic modeling, and create insightful visualizations to communicate the results of their analyses. The workshop assumes a basic familiarity with programming in R, but will approach text analysis from first principles, and assumes no prior experience in this regard. Content in the workshop will include text pre-processing for analysis (text data formats, tokenization, stemming, stop words, regular expressions); dictionary analysis (custom lexicons, tf-idf, sentiment analysis); topic modeling (LDA, CTM, STM); and data visualization. By the end of this workshop, participants will be equipped to tackle real-world text-mining tasks, and have a solid foundation to move on to more advanced analysis techniques.
Dr. Douglas Parry is a Senior Lecturer in Socio-Informatics at Stellenbosch University and a visiting Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute. His research focuses on a broad spectrum of media uses and effects and generally concerns the interplay between digital technologies, human behavior, and mental health using a variety of traditional and computational methods.