“We may classify references into categories according to the understanding which prevails among those who are accustomed to the symbols. References used in interviews may be quantified by counting the number of references which fall into each category during a selected period of time (or per thousand words uttered).”
Ahead of his time?
Timeline of Quantitative Text Analysis
Time
Activity
1934
Laswell Produces first Key-Word Count
1934
Vygotsky Produces first Quantitative Narrative Analaysis
1950
Gottschalk Uses Content Analysis to Track Freudian Themes
1950
Turing Applies AI to text
1952
Bereleson Publishes First Textbook on Content Analysis
1954
First Automatic Translation of Text (Georgetown Experiment)
1963
Msteller and Wallace analyze Federalist Papers
1965
Tomashevsky Further Formalizes Quantitative Narrative Analysis
Timeline of Quantitative Text Analysis
Time
Activity
1966
Stone and Bales use mainframe computer to measure psychometric properties of text at RAND
1980
Decline of Chomskyean Formalism/NLP is Born
1980
Machine Learning is Applied to NLP
1981
Weintraub counts parts of speech
1985
Schrodt Introduces Automated Event Coding
1986
Pennebaker develops LIWC
1988
First Latent Semantic Analysis Patent
1989
Franzosi brings Quantitative Narrative Analysis to Social Science
Timeline of Quantitative Text Analysis
Time
Activity
1998
Mohr's Quantitative Analysis of Culture
1999
Bearman et al. apply Network Methods to Narratives
2001
Blei et al. develop LDA
2002
MALLET created
2005
Quinn et al. use analyze political speeches using topic models
2009
New Directions in Text Conference
2010
King/Hopkins Bring Supervised Learning into mainstream
2010
Tools for Text Workshop at Washington
An Interdisciplinary Field!
Opening Black Boxes
From Words to Numbers
Other Great Introductions
Justin Grimmer & Brandon Stewart. Text as Data: The Promises and Pitfalls of Automated Content Analysis, Political Analysis.
James Evans & Pedro Aceves. Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory. Annual Review of Sociology.
