Text Mining: A Guidebook for the Social Sciences

by Gabe Ignatow, Rada Mihalcea, Rada F Mihalcea

Online communities generate massive volumes of natural language data and the social sciences continue to learn how to best make use of this new information and the technology available for analyzing it. Text A Guidebook for the Social Sciences brings together a broad range of contemporary qualitative and quantitative methods to provide strategic and practical guidance on analyzing large text collections. This accessible book, written by sociologist Gabe Ignatow and computer scientist Rada Mihalcea, surveys the fast-changing landscape of data sources, programming languages, software packages, and methods of analysis available today. Suitable for novice and experienced researchers alike, the book will help readers use text mining techniques more efficiently and productively.

208 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2016

Reviews

[Terran M · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a compendium of techniques you might use for text-based research, with a couple of paragraphs about each one. None of the techniques are explained in enough detail for the reader to actually execute them; the information provided is just enough to decide if it is worth going to additional references. Both qualitative and quantitative techniques are covered (the two authors appear to have essentially alternated chapters, each covering their own specialty). The coverage is much broader and shallower than you'll get from a book like Manning and Schütze. If that's what you want, this book is a good instance of it.