Section 11 Text as Data

Recall that we said, four primary goals of social science include:

• Describe and measure
  • Has the U.S. population increased?
• Explain, evaluate, and recommend (study of causation)
  • Does expanding Medicaid improve health outcomes?
• Predict
  • Who will win the next election?
• Discover
  • How do policies diffuse across states?

In this section, we start to explore the goal of discovery, seeing what we can learn from text as data.