Text Mining for Congressional Policymaking: A Webinar

The Program on Social and Political Change (PSPC), UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies (UP CIDS) is organizing a Zoom webinar, “Text Mining for Congressional Policymaking,” on 31 August 2024, 9:30 am to 12 noon, Philippine Standard Time. The webinar is free and open to all, but slots are first-come, first-served. Participants must sign up below to receive the Zoom details.

ABOUT

This public forum aims to introduce the fundamentals of text mining and text analysis, illustrating both their methodological promises and potential pitfalls and challenges in political science research. We will present examples of successful text mining applications in understanding the dynamics of the political world and policymaking, such as studies on US Senate press releases (Grimmer 2010) and Rodrigo Duterte’s crime rhetoric (Panao and Pernia 2022). Learn more about text-mining (concept note).

Specifically, the forum aims to present the results of a study, which performed text mining on press releases from the Philippine Congress since 2010 and documents accessible online from the Philippine Congress’ think tank, the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department (CPBRD). Using Python—a programming language suitable for machine learning—we scraped all the information from their websites. In total, we compiled a comprehensive corpus of approximately 10,000 documents from press releases and over 170 documents from the CPBRD. To analyze these data, we employed the R programming language to visualize and uncover empirical patterns.

Ideally, this forum will serve both as a pedagogical tool and a valuable starting point for students and teachers to initiate their own text-as-data projects. We aim to bridge real-world data with novel quantitative techniques, enriching participants’ methodological toolkits and inspiring innovative research approaches.

PROGRAM

Opening Remarks: Why Text Mining Is Important in Research and Policy Making
Rogelio Alicor Panao, PhD
Convenor, Program on Social and Political Change, UP CIDS

Lecture: Text-Mining Using Python and/or R
Ronald A. Pernia, PhD
Senior Lecturer, National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD)

Perspectives from the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department
Mr. Dominador “Ringo” M. Gamboa
Service Director, Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department, House of Representatives

QUERIES AND ORGANIZERS

For queries, please contact PSPC: [email protected]. View vicinity map.

PSPC is one of the Research Programs of the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies, the University of the Philippines’ policy research unit. Learn more and download FREE policy papers from the PSPC.