SODAS Data Discussion w/ Friedolin Merhout

Data discussion. Green colour in water

Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), is pleased to announce that we are continuing with SODAS Data Discussions this fall.

SODAS aspirers to be a resource for all students and researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We therefor invite researchers across the faculty to present ongoing research projects, project applications or just a loose idea that relates to the subject of social data science.

Every month two researchers will present their work. The rules are simple: short research presentations of ten minutes are followed by twenty minutes of debate. No papers will be circulated beforehand, and the presentations cannot be longer than five slides.

Friedolin Merhout is Assistant Professor at Department of Sociology and will present his work. 

Friedolin Merhout: Airsent: A Sentiment Dictionary for the Social Sciences

The growth and accessibility of textual data from online sources holds great promise for a variety of social scientific applications. At the same time, the volume of these newly available data poses challenges to traditional social science methods and calls for different approaches. These quantitative or automated text analysis approaches range from long-standing techniques such as keyword counts to novel unsupervised methods for topic discovery. Among these techniques, dictionary-based sentiment analysis is particularly suited for the study of social relations but existing dictionaries suffer from known limitations for these applications. This talk will outline a project combining online rating and review data from Airbnb with crowd-sourced sentiment evaluations to generate a sentiment dictionary specifically tailored to the study of social relations.

The SODAS Data Discussion will take place at SODAS' new location in building 1, 2nd floor, room 26 (1.2.26) of the CSS Campus, University of Copenhagen, from 11.00 am to 12.00 pm.

If you have questions or want to know more, please write Sophie Smitt Sindrup Grønning at sophie.groenning@samf.ku.dk.