Evans, James and Pedro Aceves. 2016. “Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory”. Annual Review of Sociology 42:21-50. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074206
The reading highlights how a key component to text analysis is coding for an underlying concept, such as feminism or democracy. While ML advances this computation significantly, how does it take into account coding, and ultimately conceptualizing, relatively new phenomena? Specifically, my research is interested in changing discourse of cybersecurity. However, unlike other security issues that have been more significantly studied, and thus, conceptualized, cybersecurity appears to be a more difficult issue to conceptualize. In part, it appears to me that the difficulty may be associated to its novelty and its quick evolving nature.
The reading highlights how a key component to text analysis is coding for an underlying concept, such as feminism or democracy. While ML advances this computation significantly, how does it take into account coding, and ultimately conceptualizing, relatively new phenomena? Specifically, my research is interested in changing discourse of cybersecurity. However, unlike other security issues that have been more significantly studied, and thus, conceptualized, cybersecurity appears to be a more difficult issue to conceptualize. In part, it appears to me that the difficulty may be associated to its novelty and its quick evolving nature.