Data Sources

by Hilary Faxon, Ph.D. & Win Moe. Non-Roman scripts pose particular challenges for text mining. Here, we reflect on a project that used text mining alongside qualitative coding to understand the politicization of online content following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup.

by Emma Turtelboom. What is the best Halloween candy? In this blog post, we will identify attributes of popular sweets and create a model to understand how these attributes influence the popularity of the sweet. We’ll discuss alternative model approaches and potential drawbacks, as well as caveats to interpreting the predictions of our model.

by Kamya Yadav. Causal inference has become the dominant endeavor for many political scientists, often at the expense of good research questions and theory building. Returning to descriptive inference – the process of describing the world as it exists – can help formulate research questions worth asking and theory that is grounded in reality. Exploratory data analysis is one method of conducting descriptive inference. It can help social science researchers find empirical patterns and puzzles that motivate their research questions, test correlations between variables, and engage with the existing literature on a topic. In this blog post, I walk through results from exploratory data analysis I conducted for my dissertation project on political ambition of women.

by Anna Björklund. In this post, Anna Björklund investigates the origin of the linguistic study of indigenous American languages, its inextricable ties to settler-colonialism, and how linguistics can move forward as a field.