The text as data
challenges and opportunities for Social Sciences
Keywords:
Automated Content Analysis, Similarity between Texts, Classification Methods, Scheduling Methods, Big DataAbstract
Communication is a fundamental tool for human relations. It is through communication that values are constructed, social symbols are established, traditions are passed on, debates are realized, politics are materialized and political conflict is expressed. A focus in analyses of social scientists, the analysis of the content trasmitted in communication has always been restricted to the need for a great amount of research funds for the manual assessment of large collections. Changing this limited scenario, recent technological, computational and scientific developments allowed social scientists to analyse larger collections of documents with low cost. Currently, through the development of new methods, it is now possible to identify behaviors that could not be observed, to measure quantities that could not be quantified, and to test hypothesis that could not be tested. In this sense, the main objective of this study is to maintain Brazilian Social Sciences at the frontier of this process and present to the reader the latest methodologies for automated content analysis. Without exhausting its several possibilities, this article is a guide to the innovative area of researching text as data.
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