The purpose of this 5-week workshop is to increase the knowledge of text mining principles among participants. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to describe the range of basic text mining techniques (everything from the creation of a corpus, to the counting/tabulating of words, to classification & clustering, and visualizing the results of text analysis) and have garnered hands­-on experience with all of them.

There are no prerequisites except for three things: 1) a sincere willingness to learn, 2) a willingness to work at a computer's command line interface, and 3) availability/committment to attend all 5 sessions (as they build upon each other).

Participants are strongly encouraged to bring their own computers to class.

The workshop is divided into the following five 90-minute sessions, one per week:

    1. Overview of text mining and working from the command line
    2. Building a corpus
    3. Word and phrase frequencies
    4. Extracting meaning with dictionaries, parts-of-speech analysis, and named entity recognition
    5. Classification and topic modeling