5th Annual Text as Data Conference

All sessions to be held in Room 348

7:15 – 8:15am Continental Breakfast - Room 362

8:15 – 8:30am Welcome from Daniel Diermeier, Conference Chair

8:30 – 10:00am Session 1: Where Politicians Lie (in ideological space)

Benjamin Lauderdale, London School of Economics - "Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Debate Texts on Heterogenous Topics" Co-author: Alexander Herzog, Clemson University.

Jonathan Dunn, Illinois Institute of Technology - "Predicting Political Ideology from Congressional Speeches" Co-author: Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology

Discussant: Paul Kellstedt, Texas A&M

10:00 – 10:15am Break - Room 362

10:15 – 11:45am Session 2: True Lies: Propaganda and Politics

Molly Roberts, UC - San Diego - "What the 'Big' Picture Reveals About Governments: Scalable Text Analysis of Millions of Newspapers in China" Co-author: Brandon Stewart, Harvard University

Michael Gill and Arthur Spirling, Harvard University - "Dimensions of Diplomacy: What the Wikileaks Cables can tell us about Information and Privacy in International Relations"

Discussant: Amber Boydstun, University of California, Davis

11:45am – 1:00pm Lunch - Room 540

1:00 – 2:30pm Session 3: Use and Reuse and Reuse

David Smith, Northeastern University - "Modeling Text Reuse for Inferring Social and Communication Networks"

Konstantin Kashin, Harvard University - "Capturing Business Power Across the States with Text Reuse" (Abstract only). Co-author: Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Harvard University

Discussant: Noah Smith, Carnegie Mellon University

2:30 – 2:45 pm Break - Room 362

2:45 – 4:15pm Session 4: (Ir)rational Expectations

Justin Farrell, Yale University- "The Social Structure of Skepticism: A Text Analysis of Climate Denial Networks"

Pablo Barbera, New York University - "Economic Conditions, Economic Perceptions, and Media Coverage of the United States Economy" Co-authors: Amber Boydstun, University of California, Davis; Suzanna Linn, Penn State University; Jonathan Nagler, New York University

Discussant: Ken Benoit, London School of Economics

4:15 – 4:30pm Break - Room 362

4:30 – 6:00pm Session 5: Tools Panel I

Nick Beauchamp, Northeastern University - "A Spatial Topic Model for Visualizing Single Documents". (Paper available upon request from Conference attendees to Peggy Cornog)

Drew Dimmery, New York University - "An Anchored Approach to Analyzing Policy Positions from Text". Co-authors: Andrew Peterson and Cyrus Samii, New York University 

6:00 – 7:00pm Reception - Room 540

7:00 – 9:00pm Dinner - Wieboldt Hall - Room 540

8:00 – 9:00am Breakfast - Room 362

9:00 – 10:30am Session 6: Legal Niceties

Yanchuan Sim, Carnegie Mellon University - "The Utility of Text: The Case of Amicus Briefs and the Supreme Court" Co-authors: Noah Smith, Bryan Routledge, Carnegie Mellon University

Hanna Wallach, Microsoft Research & University of Masachusetts, Amherst - "The Bayesian Echo Chamber: Modeling Power and Influence with Mutually Exciting Processes and Dynamic Language Models". Co-authors: Katherine Heller, Fangjian Guo, Duke University; Charles Blundell, Google

Discussant: Philip Resnik, University of Maryland 

10:30 – 10:45am Break - Room 362 

10:45 – 12:15pm Session 7: Feeling and Believing: Learning from Congressional Behavior

Adam Ramey, New York University, Abu Dhabi- "More Than a Feeling: Personality and Congressional Behavior" Co-authors: Jonathan Klingler, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse; Gary Hollibaugh Jr., University of Notre Dame 

Iulia Cioroianu, New York University - "Predicting Legislators' Votes on the Government Shutdown using Twitter" Co-authors: Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker, Duncan Penfold-Brown, Jonathan Ronen, Pablo Barbera, John Jost, Richard Bonneau, New York University

Discussant: Marc Ratkovic, Princeton University

12:15 – 1:30pm Lunch - Room 362

1:30 – 3:00pm Session 8: Relationship Advice

Aaron Gerow, University of Chicago - "Networks in Natural Language: Named Entity Co-occurences in Diachronic Corpora" Co-authors: Bowen Lou, University of Chicago; James Evans, University of Chicago

Justin Grimmer, Stanford University - "Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds" Co-authors: Lisa Blaydes and Alison McQueen, Stanford University

Discussant: Maurits Van Der Veen, College of William & Mary

3:00 – 3:15pm Break - Room 362

3:15 – 4:45 pm Session 9: Tools Panel II

Bradley Jones, University of Wisconsin, Madison - "Crowd-sourced Content Analysis: Using untrained human coders to supplement machine-processing large bodies of text"

Brendan O'Connor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst - "MITextExplorer: Linked brushing and mutual information for exploratory text data analysis"

4:45 – 5:00pm Closing remarks