From Text Signals to Simulations: A Review and Complement to Text as Data by Grimmer, Roberts & Stewart (PUP 2022)

Abstract

Text as Data represents a major advance for teaching text analysis in the social sciences, digital humanities and data science by providing an integrated framework for how to conceptualize and deploy natural language processing techniques to enrich descriptive and causal analyses of social life in and from text. Here I review achievements of the book and highlight complementary paths not taken, including discussion of recent computational techniques like transformers, which have come to dominate automated language understanding and are just beginning to find their way into the careful research designs showcased in the book. These new methods not only highlight text as a signal from society, but textual models as simulations of society, which could fuel future advances in causal inference and experimentation. Text as Data's focus on textual discovery, measurement and inference points us toward this new frontier, cautioning us not to ignore, but build upon social scientific interpretation and theory.

Large Language Models for Text Classification: From Zero-Shot Learning to Instruction-Tuning

“…Overall, we expect that LLMs will open up many new avenues for computational sociology. James Evans (2022Evans ( , 1869 recently predicted that it would take a decade or more for the generative capacity of LLMs to be utilized by social scientists, but growing public interest and awareness of these technologies since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 has accelerated their adoption for text analysis tasks. LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, trained on images and texts (Radford et al, 2021).…”

Start Generating: Harnessing Generative Artificial Intelligence for Sociological Research

“…Amidst this hype and moral panic, it is important to consider the implications of these technologies for sociological research. GAI has the potential to advance diverse areas of inquiry, including text analysis, experimentation, and simulation (Evans 2022;Bail 2023;Grossmann et al 2023).…”