Summer School: Using Text as Data: Methods and Applications

Using Text as Data for Public Policy: Machine Learning meets Economics

Next edition

5-9 July 2021 (1 week)

Applications now open! More info and enrollment here

Overview

In this course students will learn how to use large corpuses of text to support better decision making. Students will learn how to: 

1. Treat text as data. At the end of the course students will be able to convert vast archives of text into a format that can be used for data analysis.
2. Use the data generated from text to tackle policy problems in the specific environment of their respective organization

To achieve both of these goals the course will work with a combination of hands-on case studies and examples from economics. The case studies which will serve as a way to motivate and explain the toolkit. Students will, for example:

• Use Twitter data to analyze (political) trends like polarization in social networks and predict the stock market. 
• Use newspaper text to understand how news stories emerge, track uncertainty, forecast economic activity and spot and predict instability around the world.
• Use UN security council resolutions to keep track of global risks and track demands made towards countries by the security council.
• Use text from patents to construct a measure of the novelty and long-term impact of inventions. 

These case studies will be complemented by examples from established research projects in economics to illustrate how data can be used to answer policy challenges and move from data analysis to hypothesis testing and causal inference.