20. Navigating the Shores of Computational Text Analysis Validity with Christian Baden, Christian Pipa, and Mariken van der Velden

Diaries of Social Data Research

In this episode, we speak to Christian Baden, Christian Pipal, and Mariken van der Velden about their 2022 journal paper in Communications Methods and Measures, titled, “Three Gaps in Computational Text Analysis Methods for Social Sciences: A Research Agenda”. They co-authored this paper with Martijn Schoonvelde, and the authors span several disciplines, from communication to political science.

We discuss the challenges and joys of writing for a cross-disciplinary audience, how their frustrations with the validity of computational methods are shared across fields with different methodological conventions, and how this paper laid the groundwork for a larger project on European political text analysis.