Includes an implementation of PLDA.

Partially Labeled Dirchlet Allocation (PLDA) [paper] is a topic model that extends and generalizes both LDA and Labeled LDA. The model is analogous to Labeled LDA except that it allows more than one latent topic per label and a set of background labels. Learning and inference in the model is much like the example above for Labeled LDA, but you must additionally specify the number of topics associated with each label.

Politics and political con ict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many instances, the methods have already obtained part of their promise. But there are pitfalls to using automated methods: they are no substitute for careful thought and close reading and require extensive and problem specic validation. We survey a wide range of new methods, provide guidance on how to validate the output of the models, and clarify misconceptions and errors in the literature. To conclude, we argue that for automated text methods to become a standard tool for political scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods of validation.

As textual datasets grow in size and scope, social scientists need better tools to help make sense of that data. Despite the natural applicability of topic modeling to many such problems, word counts and tag clouds are often used as the primary means of gleaning information from textual data. We characterize two barriers to adoption encountered during a collaboration between the Stanford NLP group and social scientists in the school of education: accessibility and trust. Accessibility refers to the technical barriers that make text processing and topic modeling difficult. Trust comes when practitioners can explore and validate a model being used to discover or support a hypothesis. We introduce recent work aimed at solving these challenges including the Stanford Topic Modeling Toolbox software.

Across many disciplines, interest is increasing in the use of computational text analysis in the service of social science questions. We survey the spectrum of current methods, which lie on two dimensions: (1) computational and statistical model complexity; and (2) domain assumptions. This comparative perspective suggests directions of research to better align new methods with the goals of social scientists.

Traditional surveys struggle to capture socially unacceptable attitudes such as racial
animus. This paper uses Google searches including racially charged language as a proxy
for a local area’s racial animus. I use the Google-search proxy, available for roughly
200 media markets in the United States, to reassess the impact of racial attitudes on
voting for a black candidate in the United States. I compare an area’s racially charged
search volume to its votes for Barack Obama, the 2008 black Democratic presidential
candidate, controlling for its votes for John Kerry, the 2004 white Democratic presidential candidate. Other studies using a similar empirical specification and standard
state-level survey measures of racial attitudes yield little evidence that racial animus
had a major impact in recent U.S. elections. Using the Google-search proxy, I find
significant and robust effects in the 2008 presidential election. The estimates imply
that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in
the national popular vote in the 2008 election.

Normative notions of science are being used to dismiss legitimate humanistic work by the very same people who are crying out for better work on the cultural, experiential, and speculative dimensions of HCI’s enterprise. The converse is also true: humanistically marginal work is being accepted because it conforms to the veneer of scientific presentation.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively.

Through its core focus on time, space, change and movement, BOREAS aims to bring commensurability to the time scales of geophysics, archaeology and lived human experience.

Over the course of his research and teaching, he has developed theoretically driven methodologies that allow broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research and case studies.

This class deals with ways people have developed for telling others what they think they know, what their research or investigation has revealed to them about society, social life, and social problems. It thus has to do with problems of what has been call

How do new regimes of record keeping, such as the electronic patient record or the full text data base, affect what is remembered and what is forgotten?

Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is a central theory in economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences.

The key issues relate to people and the way they communicate and organize themselves, rather than discovering the underlying physical laws of the universe -- in short, the domain of social sciences.

Multicultural eating, rice boy, fashion diffusion, everyday power, urban graffiti, symbolic creativity, graffiti writing, everyday spaces.

This is one of the rare works which seem to explain new realities in a way which no one else before has grasped...

Putnam has hit the nail right on the head...

In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel describes a new way of thinking called dynamism...

Having waded through masses of literature by theorists with no practical background and a tendency to make mistakes like attributing Star Wars to Steven Spielberg, it is a delight to read a text that is grounded in both experience and solid rhetoric...

Best known for THE FATE OF THE EARTH (1982), Jonathan Schell is an anti-war essayist and frequent contributor to "The Nation," "The New Yorker," "Harper's," "The Atlantic," and "Foreign Affairs" magazines...

This huge tome is a must have for anyone who wants to deeply understand hypertext and its precursors...

More than half of the world's petrol sources have already been exhausted, and now, with rapidly industrializing countries with huge populations like China and India, demand and competition for petrol will skyrocket and accordingly prices will too...

The Quilt's of Gee's Bend exhibit was at the Corcoran in Washington DC earlier this year...

This book attacks a fairly narrow question, "Why does a society with such a reputation for conformity chase such outlandish fads?" Donald Richie, a long timer writer on Japanese culture, tackles this in a series of essays on pachinko, the culture of...

This review is being written as I am reading "The Presentation of the Self" for the third time...

Problems: <br /> <br />1...

Given Castells' huge range of understanding and the sheer ambition of his work, it seems a bit unfair to really criticize this book...

Gregory Bateson made substantial contributions to many fields of science...

In Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin analyze new technologies and their implications for American society...

I thought that many of Barthes's themes resound astonishingly well even today...

Why more people don't know his name is beyond me...

Marcus' prose is rambling and poorly directed...

This is yet another wonderful collection of strange Japanese Comics...

As a photographer, I know that the look of my product determines how much money I can potentially make...

In this book, Liu makes a persuasive argument that knowledge workers can resist the dominant postcapitalist business ideology from the inside by developing an "ethos of the unknown...

This is a comprehensive survey of the anthropological study of human universals, human nature, culture vs...

It's an excellent book to read indeed...

Many of the observations Prof...

Bud Goodall's book is probably the most important work that I have read the entire time I have been in school...

'On the Shoulders of Giants' (which shall hereafter be referred to as OTSOG) is the quintessential study of the nature of academicism...

Explores the new environments arising at the junctions of interstate highways on the edges of major American metropolises...

Baudrillard's book will disturb you...

While no book is able to entirely encapsulate a culture, Yoshio Sugimoto's "An Introduction to Japanese Society" manages to showcase the ethnic and economical diversity alongside pop culture and "Friendly Authoritarianism," something that one can see...

A great subject, tackled by a writer who has a nice sense of language -- but please, somebody take a red pen to this book! This isn't a dissertation anymore (I assume it once was -- it certainly reads like one)...

Tired of your newsweekly's glitzy "media" column? Or establishment outlets like CNN Reliable Sources? This book is some non-corporate, free thinking...

It'd be one thing to point out all the flaws in suburban and modern architecture and planning now, after all the failures are fairly well known and felt, but to do it in '61, I give Jane Jacobs a lot of credit...

I read this book shortly after reading 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' and this one is the winner hands down...

Weiss's book mirrors the combination of seemingly unforced flow and attention to focus that are characteristic of good qualitative interviews...

(It's been a while since I read this book so please bear this in mind when reading this review...

Discussing law is always a challenge to an author, especially if he/she wishes to make it simple, interesting, and critical...

This collection of essays is insightful but far from comprehensive, a good starting point for further discussion on commodification...

This is an interesting book, but in some chapters it tends to focus more on the historical role of the child than it addresses current social issues that are of concern in our society...

The Anatomy of Dependence by Takeo Doi is a look at one facet of Japanese society...

This is a great collection by some of the outstanding contemporary specialists on Japanese popular culture...

As I look at today's news, it appears that we don't really know what a marriage is...

Gelder and Thornton have pulled together a book that I could have based my entire senior thesis upon as the sole source...

Dr. Sowell penetrates the fog that is sprayed out by today's victim industry...

I'm a practicing child psychologist, and I have followed the media and their impact on children for a number of years...