The ABC of Computational Text Analysis

#3 Setting up your Development Environment

Alex Flückiger

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Lucerne

17 March 2022

Outline

  • research workflow 📑
  • interacting with computers 🪄
  • installation of programs 🔨

Recap last Lecture

  • textual data is challenging
  • machine-readable data

The Zen of Organizing

Research means Organizing

How a computational approach helps

  • scripts as documentation 📝
  • efficient automation ♻️
    • “don’t repeat yourself”
  • less error-prone 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♂️
  • reproducible 💯

Organizing Literature

  • manage literature in one place
  • generating bibliographies
  • collect with a click in your browser
Zotero is a free, open-source software for managing scientific literature

Computers

Operating Systems (OS)

Between hardware and programs

  • Microsoft Windows
  • macOS
  • Linux-based systems 🤓

User Interfaces

graphical user interface (GUI)

command line interface (CLI)

“An awesome Programmer saves the World”

Human-Machine Interaction

How to tell the computer effienctly

  • text commands instead of clicks
  • similar to human languages
    • syntax (form)
    • semantics (meaning)
  • computers are literalists

Programming

  • command languages
    • Bourne-Again shell (Bash), since 1989
  • programming languages
    • Python, R, Java, C++ etc.
  • instructions → program ≡ algorithm
    • cooking

Package Manager

  • automation of software installation

    • system: apt, Homebrew
    • Python: pip, conda

  • software dependencies

  • similar to app stores

Open-Source is a Mindset

Standing on the shoulders of giants

  • free + open software
  • cross-platform portability
  • collaboration
    • share + reuse
  • helpful community

Resources everyone is using

Learning by doing, doing by Googleing.
🤸‍♀️🤸‍♂️

Set up your System

Backup 👹

You don’t need it until you desperately need it!

Setting up your Development Environment

Installation

  • Python 3.8
    • packages for NLP + visualization
  • Tesseract
  • various Bash tools
  • VS Code Editor

👉 Follow the installation guide for your OS.

Relax.
It takes a while.

VS Code Editor

The Microsoft Word for coding

  • powerful integrated development environment (IDE)
  • cross-platform
  • interactive analysis
Write your first Python script in VS Code

First Steps in Python

Learn Python with interactive tutorials

Readings

optional: pimp your workflow

Healy, Kieran. 2019. “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.” online.

Questions?

References

Healy, Kieran. 2019. “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.” https://kieranhealy.org/publications/plain-person-text/.