Chris Bail, PhD
Duke University
www.chrisbail.net
github.com/cbail
twitter.com/chris_bail

Introduction

This is the last in a series of tutorials designed to introduce quantitative text analysis in R. This tutorial focuses upon one of the newest methods in this field, called Text Networks.

What is a Text Network?

Network analysis refers to a family of methods that describe relationships between units of analysis. A network is comprised of nodes as well as the edges or connections between them. In a social network—such as the one in the figure below—nodes are often individual people, and edges describe friendships, affiliations, or other types of social relationships. A rich theoretical tradition in the social sciences describes how patterns of clustering within social networks—and an individual’s position within or between clusters— is associated with a remarkably wide range of outcomes including health, employment, education, and many others.


Though network analysis is most often used to describe relationships between people, some of the early pioneers of network analysis realized that it could also be applied to represent relationships between words. For example, one can represent a corpus of documents as a network where each node is a document, and the thickness or strength of the edges between them describes similarities between the words used in any two documents. Or, one can create a textnetwork where individual words are the nodes, and the edges between them describe the regularity with which they co-occur in documents.

There are multiple advantages to a network-based approach to automated text analysis. Just as clusters of social connections can help explain a range of outcomes, understanding patterns of connections between words helps identify their meaning in a more precise manner than the “bag of words” approaches discussed in earlier tutorials. Second, text networks can be built out of documents of any length, whereas topic models function poorly on short texts such as social media messages. Finally, there is an arguably more sophisticated set of techniques for identifying clusters within social networks than those employed in other automated text analysis techniques described in my earlier tutorials.

Two-Mode Networks

Before we move on to a working example, we will need to delve a little bit deeper into some terminology from network analysis—specifically, the concept of two-mode networks. To clarify this concept, let’s look at a hypothetical group of Twitter users tweeting about the COVID-19 pandemic, pictured in the diagram below: