workshop overview

learning objectives

Welcome to text analysis! This workshop introduces how to use Python to search for patterns in text. We will build on the skills from the previous workshops on Python basics and gathering data with web scraping toward explore textual patterns with Python. Although that material will help you to follow along with the concepts here, this workshop is designed to be useful for programmers at all levels, including total beginners.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have:

• a high level understanding of text analysis and the stages of a text analysis project

• familiarity with the spaCy library for Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• familiarity with some popular tasks for NLP, like Named Entity Recognition (NER)

• practice with writing “rules” for extracting patterns from text

• practice with reading and understanding Python syntax

Google Colab

Like the previous workshops in the series, this workshop will continue to use Google Colab, a browser-based tool for running Python code. Google Colab offers a cloud environment for authoring content, much like Google Docs. This means that you can use Colab without having to download and install Python.

If you are new to Google Colab, please see this tutorial for specifics on how to run Python within the Google Colab environment.