Text Analysis

My Summer Exploring Data Science for Social Justice: Learnings, Tensions & Recommendations

September 5, 2023
Genevieve Smith
by Genevieve Smith. This summer I joined the D-Lab hosted Data Science for Social Justice workshop at UC Berkeley diving into Python – including TF-IDF, sentiment analysis, word embeddings, and more – with a lens towards leveraging data science for social justice. My team explored a Reddit channel on abortion and used computational analysis to answer key questions related to abortion access from before versus after Roe vs. Wade was overturned. Computational social science is incredibly powerful, but I continue to grapple with tensions particularly as it relates to employing machine learning and large language in international research, and end with key recommendations for CSS practitioners.

Twitter Text Analysis: A Friendly Introduction

October 25, 2022
Mingyu Yuan

Read part 2 here.

Introduction

Text analysis techniques, including sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and named entity recognition, have been increasingly used to probe patterns in a variety of text-based documents, such as books, social media posts, and others. This blog post introduces Twitter text analysis, but is not intended to cover all of the aforementioned topics. The tutorial is broken down into two parts. In this very first post, I...

Peter Amerkhanian

Graduate Student Researcher (GSR), Instructor
Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP)

I’m a D-Lab GSR and a graduate student in The Goldman School’s Master of Public Policy/The I School’s Graduate Certificate in Applied Data Science. I have 5 years of experience working on data problems in government and nonprofits. I’m interested in social policy, program evaluation, and computational methods. Python is my principal language, but I’ve developed experience using and teaching a variety of other tools, including R, Excel, Tableau, and JavaScript. I deeply enjoy teaching data science methods and am excited to be a part of the D-Lab.

Abhishek Roy

IUSE Undergraduate Advisory Board
Economics
Data Science

I'm Abhishek Roy and I'm double majoring in Economics and Data Science. I've been a part of D-Lab's IUSE project since Spring 2020 and have truly found an organization that is not only passionate about Data Science but also strives to expand its reach equitably to all communities. I am involved in Research and Project Management roles in various departments and labs at Berkeley and I'm an Editor at the Berkeley Economic Review. I love diving into anything at the intersection of Data Science, Economics, Business, and Computational Social Science. Whenever I'm free, I love writing...

Ella Belfer

Consultant
Energy and Resources Group

Ella is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group. Her research examines water governance in a changing climate, drawing on geo-spatial techniques. Her past work includes applications of topic modelling in climate change adaptation research, and inductive coding of semi-structured interviews.

Katherine Wolf

Adjunct Fellow
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Doctoral student in Rachel Morello-Frosch's laboratory in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management working at the intersection of environmental epidemiology, environmental justice, and causal inference. Particularly interested in developing quantitative methods to investigate the operation of social power in environmental monitoring regimes in the United States.

Spencer Le

Data Peer Consultant, UTech
Computer Science
Data Science

I am a senior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Data Science. I love crunching down big data and analyzing it in order to help solve real-life issues. In my free time, I like jamming out to music, drawing, studying history, and posting on my foodstagram. If you have any questions regarding Computer Science or Data Science, please stop by!

Twitter data extraction with Selenium

March 1, 2022
Seyi Olojo

Introduction

With online communities and social networks serving as important sites for computational social science research, Twitter has quickly become a popular data source for researchers (Frey et al. (2020), Kusen et al. (2017), Rao et al. (2010) and Ru et al. (2021)). This blog post will demonstrate one way to extract twitter data without using the Twitter API. This is especially useful for researchers who are new to exploring the use of Twitter data in their research, looking to develop a baseline corpus for a research question they are newly...

PoliPy: A Python Library for Scraping and Analyzing Privacy Policies

February 8, 2022
Nikita Samarin

In light of recent scandals involving the misuse and improper handling of personal data by large corporations, advocacy groups and regulators alike have given increased attention to the issue of consumer privacy [e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. National and local governments have been enacting privacy legislation that requires companies to minimize the amount of data they collect, deters the collection of sensitive data, limits the purposes for which the data are used, and critically, gives users more transparency into data collection and use.

As part...

Jennifer Kaplan

Consultant
French

Jennifer is a first-year graduate student in the Romance Languages & Literatures program here at Berkeley. She has experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork and is passionate about qualitative research methods.