Text-mining international politics - JPM936

• Title: Text-mining international politics
• Czech title: Text-mining mezinárodní politiky
• Guaranteed by: Department of International Relations (23-KMV)
• Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences
• Actual: from 2019
• Semester: summer
• E-Credits: 4
• Examination process: summer s.:
• Hours per week, examination: summer s.:1/1, MC [HT]
• Capacity: 25 / unknown (20)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: not taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment
• Guarantor: Dr. rer. pol. Michal Parízek, M.Sc., Ph.D.
• Teacher(s): Dr. rer. pol. Michal Parízek, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Annotation

Last update: Dr. rer. pol. Michal Parízek, M.Sc., Ph.D. (29.01.2019)

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 ([e-mail]) 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.

Course completion requirements

Last update: Dr. rer. pol. Michal Parízek, M.Sc., Ph.D. (29.04.2019)

Successful participants will be awarded with 4 ECTS. The evaluation of student performance will be based on three criteria:

• Thorough reading of the obligatory literature marked with (O) in the syllabus below
• Regular and active participation in the individual six sessions of the seminar
• A short research-design paper (4,000-5,000 words) that discusses whether and which automated text analyses might be suited to address a freely chosen question on the EU, international politics, or related fields (more details during the seminar)

The papers deadline will be on June 7.

Literature

Last update: Dr. rer. pol. Michal Parízek, M.Sc., Ph.D. (01.02.2019)

The readings for the course are available for download at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IaqnFCE7MAQyhlQ0lc0gW-f_iOE0lVJ3?usp=sharing

Registration requirements

Last update: Dr. rer. pol. Michal Parízek, M.Sc., Ph.D. (22.01.2019)

The course targets advanced BA as well as MA students in the political sciences or related disciplines who wish to broaden their empirical toolkit. Prior knowledge in content analysis or quantitative methods is not required but may be an asset.

 

Registration for the block course is required during the standard registration period at the beginning of the semester.