Hello computational fans!

Thanks to those who attended the MediaCloud workshop! Zhongkai and I were thrilled with the attendance and eagerness to learn.

Zhongkai’s Python code and my powerpoint are available in our Box folder: https://uwmadison.box.com/v/computational1819

For those who are not familiar with Python, I would recommend DataCamp’s newly developed course, Analyzing Social Media Data in Python. The instructor, Alex, is an alumna of our Computational Methods Research Group, and the Social Media and Democracy research group. Though only the first chapter is free, subscriptions are relatively cheap (and DataCamp is a great resource for people hoping to teach themselves data science skills independently).

Next week, we will not have a Computational Methods workshop. Our department will be hosting Former Dean of UT-Austin’s Moody College of Communication Rod Hart. A pioneer of computational methods in mass communication, Hart developed a dictionary-based text analysis program called DICTION, which measures various rhetorical and semantic features such as certainty, optimism, and commonality. We will actually be teaching DICTION at our Nov 2 workshop, so if you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to attend his talk .

The week after (Oct 5), we will be going over the R scraping package, rvest. For the workshop, we will be using the data we collected from MediaCloud, so please make sure you save any results you want to use.

Jo