From Texts to Networks: Semantic, Socio-Semantic and Discourse Networks

Abstract

Collecting data on political networks is a considerable challenge. Significant resources are required to obtain political networks, while in many cases, collecting network data proves unviable. At the same time, previously unthinkable volumes of texts containing information over political actors and their connections become publicly available. This panel wants to address and showcase research activities, which are tapping texts to obtain discourse, semantic, and socio-semantic networks. The panel will show how network research might benefit from text analysis methods used both in traditional political science, as well as outside of the field (such as computation linguistics or natural language processing). Controbutions which 1) use text as data base for political networks; 2) utilize various text analysis approaches to find ties between actors; or 3) combine text analysis with social networks, are invited.