Program on Text Research

The third annual New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data conference will take place at Harvard on October 5--6, 2012. This conference is sponsored jointly by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the London School of Economics.  

All events take place in the CGIS South building, which is at 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138. The nearest T-stop is Harvard Square. 

SCHEDULE:

FRIDAY

BREAKFAST (Friday, 8:00--8:45AM)

OPENING REMARKS (8:45--9:00AM)

1) SECRETS AND LIES (Friday, 9:00-10:30AM)

1. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression,”  Gary King, Molly Roberts, and Jennifer Pan (Harvard) (paper)
2. “Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination,"  Claire Cardie (Cornell) (paper)

Discussant: Kenneth Benoit (LSE)

COFFEE BREAK (10:30-11:00AM)

2) AMERICA! (11:00-12:30PM)

1. “How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation,”  Justin Grimmer (Stanford) (paper)
2. “Textual predictors of bill survival in Congressional committees,"  Tae Yano, Noah Smith (Carnegie Mellon), and John Wilkerson (University of Washington) (paper)

Discussant:  Nicholas Beauchamp (NYU)

LUNCH (12:30-1:30PM)

3) ON TOPIC(S) (1:30-3:00PM)

1. “Vanilla Models for Measurement of Topic and Topicky Concepts in Text,"  Margaret H. Ariotti, Muhammed Idris, Burt Monroe, and Eitan Tzelgov (Penn State)
2. “Topic-Specific Communication Patterns from Email Data,” Bruce Desmarais, Peter Krafft, Hanna Wallach, James ben-Aaron, and Juston Moore  (UMass-Amherst) (paper)

Discussant: Scott Moser (Texas)

COFFEE BREAK (3:00-3:30PM)

4) ARGUABLY... (3:30-5:00PM)

1.  “The Exaggerated Life of Death Panels: The Limits of Framing Effects on Health Care Attitudes", Dan Hopkins (Georgetown) (paper)
2. “ ‘I Want to Talk About, Again, My Record On Energy...’:  Modeling Control of the Topic in Political Debates and Other Conversations,”  Phil Resnik with Jordan Boyd-Graber and Viet-An Nguyen (University of Maryland) (paper)

Discussant: Justin Gross (UNC-Chapel Hill)

SATURDAY

BREAKFAST (Saturday, 8:30-9:30AM)

5) RISE OF THE MACHINES (Saturday, 9:30-11:00AM)

1. “Automated Coding of Political Events from a Very Large Text Base,”  Phil Schrodt and Jay Yonamine (Penn State) (paper)
2. “Crowd-sourced data coding for the social sciences: massive non-expert coding of political texts,”  Kenneth Benoit (LSE), Drew Conway (NYU), Michael Laver (NYU), and Slava Mikhaylov (UCL) (paper)

Discussant: Amber Boydstun (UC Davis)

COFFEE BREAK (11:00-11:30AM)

6) HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE (11:30AM-1:00PM)

1. “Echoes of power:  Language effects and power differences in social interaction,” Cristian 
   Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee, Bo Pang, and Jon Kleinberg. (paper)
2. “Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Planetary-Scale Contagious Outbreaks,”  Manuel Garcia-Herranz, Estaban Moro Egido, Manuel Cebrian, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler (UC San Diego) (abstract)

Discussant: Will Lowe (University of Mannheim)

LUNCH (1:00-2:00PM)

7) METHODS ROUNDTABLE (2:00-3:30PM)

1.  “A RegEx Machine,”  Peter Bol, Shih-pei Chen, and Elif Yamangil (Harvard) (paper)
2. “Knowing Where and How Criminal Organizations Operate Using Web Content,”  Michele Coscia and Viridiana Rios (Harvard) (paper)
3. “Summarizing topical content with word frequency and exclusivity,"  Jon Bischof and Edo Airoldi (Harvard) (paper)
4. “Improving Robustness in Qualitative and Quantitative Content Analysis: A three stage model,”  Aude Bicquelet (LSE) (paper)