This workshop will introduce you to the basics of text mining, and help you think about ways to incorporate it into your research. Over the last few years, several text mining tools have appeared that researchers without deep technical expertise can easily use. These tools can illuminate patterns in both individual texts and in corpora containing billions of words.

In this session, we will look at some of these tools, talk about why they might be helpful for your work, and discuss practical and theoretical questions about the research methods they enable. This introductory session will prepare you for several workshops later in the semester covering specific methods and tools for building concordances, topic models, and word embedding models.