Computational Analysis of Communication

Provides clear guidance on leveraging computational techniques to answer social science questions

In disciplines such as political science, sociology, psychology, and media studies, the use of computational analysis is rapidly increasing. Statistical modeling, machine learning, and other computational techniques are revolutionizing the way electoral results are predicted, social sentiment is measured, consumer interest is evaluated, and much more. Computational Analysis of Communication teaches social science students and practitioners how computational methods can be used in a broad range of applications, providing discipline-relevant examples, clear explanations, and practical guidance.

Assuming little or no background in data science or computer linguistics, this accessible textbook teaches readers how to use state-of-the art computational methods to perform data-driven analyses of social science issues. A cross-disciplinary team of authors—with expertise in both the social sciences and computer science—explains how to gather and clean data, manage textual, audio-visual, and network data, conduct statistical and quantitative analysis, and interpret, summarize, and visualize the results. Offered in a unique hybrid format that integrates print, ebook, and open-access online viewing, this innovative resource:

• Covers the essential skills for social sciences courses on big data, data visualization, text analysis, predictive analytics, and others
• Integrates theory, methods, and tools to provide unified approach to the subject
• Includes sample code in Python and links to actual research questions and cases from social science and communication studies
• Discusses ethical and normative issues relevant to privacy, data ownership, and reproducible social science
• Developed in partnership with the International Communication Association and by the editors of Computational Communication Research

Computational Analysis of Communication is an invaluable textbook and reference for students taking computational methods courses in social sciences, and for professional social scientists looking to incorporate computational methods into their work.

Dr. Wouter van Atteveldt is an Associate Professor of Political Communication at Vrije University, Amsterdam. He is Chair of Computational Methods of the International Communication Association, and Founding Chief Editor of Computational Communication Science. He has published extensively on innovative methods for analyzing political text and contributed to a number of relevant R and Python packages.  

Dr. Damian Trilling is an Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Science, at the University of Amsterdam, and Associate Editor of Computational Communication Research. His research uses computational methods such as the analysis of digital trace data and large-scale text analysis to study the use and effects of news media. He has developed extensive teaching materials to introduce social scientists to the Python programming language.  

Dr. Carlos Arcila Calderón is an Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Communication, at the University of Salamanca, Chief Editor of the journal Disertaciones, and member of the Editorial Board of Computational Communication Research. He has published extensively on new media and social media studies, and has led the prototype Autocop, a Spark-based environment to run distributed supervised sentiment analysis of Twitter messages.  

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction 1

1.1 The Role of Computational Analysis in the Social Sciences 1

1.2 Why Python and/or R? 3

1.3 How to Use This Book 4

1.4 Installing R and Python 5

1.4.1 Installing R and RStudio 7

1.4.2 Installing Python and Jupyter Notebook 9

1.5 Installing Third-Party Packages 12

2 Getting Started: Fun with Data and Visualizations 13

2.1 Fun With Tweets 14

2.2 Fun With Textual Data 15

2.3 Fun With Visualizing Geographic Information 17

2.4 Fun With Networks 19

3 Programming Concepts for Data Analysis 23

3.1 About Objects and Data Types 24

3.1.1 Storing Single Values: Integers, Floating-Point Numbers, Booleans 25

3.1.2 Storing Text 26

3.1.3 Combining Multiple Values: Lists, Vectors, And Friends 28

3.1.4 Dictionaries 32

3.1.5 From One to More Dimensions: Matrices and n-Dimensional Arrays 33

3.1.6 Making Life Easier: Data Frames 34

3.2 Simple Control Structures: Loops and Conditions 35

3.2.1 Loops 36

3.2.2 Conditional Statements 37

3.3 Functions and Methods 39

4 How to Write Code 43

4.1 Re-using Code: How Not to Re-Invent the Wheel 43

4.2 Understanding Errors and Getting Help 46

4.2.1 Error Messages 46

4.2.2 Debugging Strategies 48

4.3 Best Practice: Beautiful Code, GitHub, and Notebooks 49

5 From File to Data Frame and Back 55

5.1 Why and When Do We Use Data Frames? 56

5.2 Reading and Saving Data 57

5.2.1 The Role of Files 57

5.2.2 Encodings and Dialects 59

5.2.3 File Handling Beyond Data Frames 61

5.3 Data from Online Sources 62

6 Data Wrangling 65

6.1 Filtering, Selecting, and Renaming 66

6.2 Calculating Values 67

6.3 Grouping and Aggregating 69

6.3.1 Combining Multiple Operations 70

6.3.2 Adding Summary Values 71

6.4 Merging Data 72

6.4.1 Equal Units of Analysis 72

6.4.2 Inner and Outer Joins 75

6.4.3 Nested Data 76

6.5 Reshaping Data: Wide To Long And Long To Wide 78

6.6 Restructuring Messy Data 79

7 Exploratory Data Analysis 83

7.1 Simple Exploratory Data Analysis 84

7.2 Visualizing Data 87

7.2.1 Plotting Frequencies and Distributions 88

7.2.2 Plotting Relationships 92

7.2.3 Plotting Geospatial Data 98

7.2.4 Other Possibilities 99

7.3 Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction 100

7.3.1 k-means Clustering 101

7.3.2 Hierarchical Clustering 102

7.3.3 Principal Component Analysis and Singular Value Decomposition 106

8 Statistical Modeling and Supervised Machine Learning 113

8.1 Statistical Modeling and Prediction 115

8.2 Concepts and Principles 117

8.3 Classical Machine Learning: From Naïve Bayes to Neural Networks 122

8.3.1 Naïve Bayes 122

8.3.2 Logistic Regression 124

8.3.3 Support Vector Machines 125

8.3.4 Decision Trees and Random Forests 127

8.3.5 Neural Networks 129

8.4 Deep Learning 130

8.4.1 Convolutional Neural Networks 131

8.5 Validation and Best Practices 133

8.5.1 Finding a Balance Between Precision and Recall 133

8.5.2 Train, Validate, Test 137

8.5.3 Cross-validation and Grid Search 138

9 Processing Text 141

9.1 Text as a String of Characters 142

9.1.1 Methods for Dealing With Text 144

9.2 Regular Expressions 145

9.2.1 Regular Expression Syntax 146

9.2.2 Example Patterns 147

9.3 Using Regular Expressions in Python and R 150

9.3.1 Splitting and Joining Strings, and Extracting Multiple Matches 151

10 Text as Data 155

10.1 The Bag of Words and the Term-Document Matrix 156

10.1.1 Tokenization 157

10.1.2 The DTM as a Sparse Matrix 159

10.1.3 The DTM as a “Bag of Words” 162

10.1.4 The (Unavoidable) Word Cloud 163

10.2 Weighting and Selecting Documents and Terms 164

10.2.1 Removing stop words 165

10.2.2 Removing Punctuation and Noise 167

10.2.3 Trimming a DTM 170

10.2.4 Weighting a DTM 171

10.3 Advanced Representation of Text 172

10.3.1 n-grams 173

10.2.3 Collocations 174

10.3.3 Word Embeddings 176

10.3.4 Linguistic Preprocessing 177

10.4 Which Preprocessing to Use? 182

11 Automatic Analysis of Text 184

11.1 Deciding on the Right Method 185

11.2 Obtaining a Review Dataset 187

11.3 Dictionary Approaches to Text Analysis 189

11.4 Supervised Text Analysis: Automatic Classification and Sentiment Analysis 191

11.4.1 Putting Together a Workflow 191

11.4.2 Finding the Best Classifier 194

11.4.3 Using the Model 198

11.4.4 Deep Learning 199

11.5 Unsupervised Text Analysis: Topic Modeling 203

11.5.1 Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) 203

11.5.2 Fitting an LDA Model 206

11.5.3 Analyzing Topic Model Results 207

11.5.4 Validating and Inspecting Topic Models 208

11.5.5 Beyond LDA 209

12 Scraping Online Data 212

12.1 Using Web APIs: From Open Resources to Twitter 213

12.2 Retrieving and Parsing Web Pages 219

12.2.1 Retrieving and Parsing an HTML Page 219

12.2.2 Crawling Websites 223

12.2.3 Dynamic Web Pages 225

12.3 Authentication, Cookies, and Sessions 228

12.3.1 Authentication and APIs 228

12.3.2 Authentication and Webpages 229

12.4 Ethical, Legal, and Practical Considerations 230

13 Network Data 233

13.1 Representing and Visualizing Networks 234

13.2 Social Network Analysis 241

13.2.1 Paths and Reachability 242

13.2.2 Centrality Measures 246

13.2.3 Clustering and Community Detection 248

14 Multimedia Data 258

14.1 Beyond Text Analysis: Images, Audio and Video 259

14.2 Using Existing Libraries and APIs 261

14.3 Storing, Representing, and Converting Images 263

14.4 Image Classification 270

14.4.1 Basic Classification with Shallow Algorithms 272

14.4.2 Deep Learning for Image Analysis 273

14.4.3 Re-using an Open Source CNN 279

15 Scaling Up and Distributing 283

15.1 Storing Data in SQL and noSQL Databases 283

15.1.1 When to Use a Database 283

15.1.2 Choosing the Right Database 285

15.1.3 A Brief Example Using SQLite 286

15.2 Using Cloud Computing 286

15.3 Publishing Your Source 290

15.4 Distributing Your Software as Container 291

16 Where to Go Next 293

16.1 How Far Have We Come? 293

16.2 Where To Go Next? 294

16.3 Open, Transparent, and Ethical Computational Science 295

Bibliography 297

Index 303

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