After attending the IPSA Summer School last January 2012 at the University of Sao Paulo, I took interest in researching more about Agenda Setting. Sometime in February, I had the privilege to correspond with Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones who were kind enough to suggest that I look into the Comparative Agendas Project and the American Agenda Project. Their website pointed me to their codebook which identified, in 2008, 19 major Topics that can be used to categorize and score political texts.
Afterwards, I decided to pursue the study of political text, specifically presidential speeches using their codebook. It is a gargantuan task to do this alone. And, without the proper funding, I can only depend on the pro-bono work of interested students and colleagues.
There was a lull in the earlier part of this semester since I had to attend to preparations for my PhD Comprehensive exams. But now that that is over, I intend to resume my work on these political texts. I am now in the pre-processing stage -- cleaning documents, dividing them into quasi-sentences and arranging these into a matrix. While my initial intention was to go for a computer-assisted text analysis of these speeches, I decided to forego this in the meantime and, instead, go through text analysis that relies heavily on human intervention (scoring). My initial issue had to do with reliability. So, I asked a former student of mine if he was interested in participating. He immediately said "Yes".
With two coders, I can now proceed with the research. This is exciting.
Afterwards, I decided to pursue the study of political text, specifically presidential speeches using their codebook. It is a gargantuan task to do this alone. And, without the proper funding, I can only depend on the pro-bono work of interested students and colleagues.
There was a lull in the earlier part of this semester since I had to attend to preparations for my PhD Comprehensive exams. But now that that is over, I intend to resume my work on these political texts. I am now in the pre-processing stage -- cleaning documents, dividing them into quasi-sentences and arranging these into a matrix. While my initial intention was to go for a computer-assisted text analysis of these speeches, I decided to forego this in the meantime and, instead, go through text analysis that relies heavily on human intervention (scoring). My initial issue had to do with reliability. So, I asked a former student of mine if he was interested in participating. He immediately said "Yes".
With two coders, I can now proceed with the research. This is exciting.
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