Join the Last Computational Demography Working Group Meeting of the Quarter
Posted: 3/4/2019 ()
Our final Computational Demography meeting of the quarter is this week! Ian Kennedy, Sociology graduate student, will draw on a few of his research projects to demo and discuss the relationship between text data and demography. The CDWG will meet 12:00-1:30 PM on Thursday, 3/7/2019, in Raitt 114. Food will be provided, and all are welcome! The CDWG is co-sponsored by CSDE and the eScience Institute. For more information about the working group, check out our spiffy new website.
Here’s what Ian shared about the exciting topics he has in store for us:
While demography has often been associated with enumeration, scholars have often recognized the importance of action and perception in the production of population trends. However, whether examining migration patterns or ethnic identification, we often cannot collect good data about those actions and perceptions. Instead, new tools like web scraping and better accessibility to administrative data mean give us a window into action and perception at a large scale, a window paned with text data. If that metaphor feels a bit pained, forgive me, then think about this presentation as simply an introduction to new ways to scrape, process, and analyze text as data to study demographic topics. I’ll briefly cover web scraping and automation using selenium, methods for cleaning, word and document level models for analyzing text, and some gestures towards deep learning possibilities. The data examples come from Craigslist, Twitter, and administrative sources to answer questions about housing dynamics, racist discourse, and evictions.
Date: 03/07/2019
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM
Location: 114 Raitt