IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data
University of Padova, 4-8 September 2017
In your next research project, are you planning to take into account a large number of novels, newspaper articles , transcriptions of open-ended interviews, or comments posted on social media?
Are there definitely too many texts for any scholar to read in a life-span perspective?
Why not trying to ask a computer to do this for you?
A software package cannot "close read" a text. On the contrary, by means of mathematical and statistical tools, it might be smart enough to "distant read" a text, i.e. collecting data, retrieving relevant information, summarizing features, finding patterns, etc. Instead of close-reading a limited number of texts, why not working with thousands of texts, uploading them into the memory of a computer and asking a software package to produce analyses and results?