An Introduction to Text Mining: Research Design, Data Collection, and Analysis - Softcover

Ignatow, Gabe; Mihalcea, Rada F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1506337007 ISBN 13: 9781506337005

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc, 2017

Synopsis

Students in social science courses communicate, socialize, shop, learn, and work online. When they are asked to collect data for course projects they are often drawn to social media platforms and other online sources of textual data. There are many software packages and programming languages available to help students collect data online, and there are many texts designed to help with different forms of online research, from surveys to ethnographic interviews. But there is no textbook available that teaches students how to construct a viable research project based on online sources of textual data such as newspaper archives, site user comment archives, digitized historical documents, or social media user comment archives. Gabe Ignatow and Rada F. Mihalcea′s new text An Introduction to Text Mining will be a starting point for undergraduates and first-year graduate students interested in collecting and analyzing textual data from online sources, and will cover the most critical issues that students must take into consideration at all stages of their research projects, including: ethical and philosophical issues; issues related to research design; web scraping and crawling; strategic data selection; data sampling; use of specific text analysis methods; and report writing.

About this title

About the Author

Gabe Ignatow is Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Texas. His research interests are mainly in the areas of sociological theory, digital research methods, cognitive social science, and the philosophy of social science. His most recent books are Text Mining and An Introduction to Text Mining, both coauthored with Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan). He is also a coeditor, with Wayne Brekhus (University of Missouri), of the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology.

Review

"This is a comprehensive book on a timely and important research method for social scientific research. Researchers who want to learn the development of text mining methods and learn how to integrate the methods into their research projects will find this book beneficial."

Author: Kenneth C. C. Yang

"In the age of big data, this text is an excellent introduction to text mining for undergraduates and beginning graduate students. The proliferation of text as data particularly in social media require the inclusion of this topic in the data analysis toolkit of the social scientist."

Author: A. Victor Ferreros

"This is an excellent book that covers a broad range of topics on text analysis. Examples from a variety of disciplines are used, making the text useful to students across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences and also accessible to those who do not have a deep background in this area."

Author: Jennifer Bachner

"This book provides an excellent base for budding data scientists and provides tools, methods and references that will be extremely useful in their work. Methods from various disciplines are discussed in detail and provide a wonderful base for building business appropriate data mining projects."

Author: Roger D. Clark

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1506337007
• ISBN 13: 9781506337005
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 346