The End of an Era? Potentials of Text Mining Online Media Monitoring for Emulating Opinion Pools Attitude Surveys

The 2nd DAY (January 9, Wednesday) PROGRAM of THE CONFERENCE "The End of an Era? Potentials of Text Mining Online Media Monitoring for Emulating Opinion Pools Attitude Surveys" IS CANCELLED.

Date: January 8-9, 2013
Place: santralistanbul Campus, E4-305
Participants:
Prof. Dr. Sophia Ananiadou (University of Manchester); Prof. Dr. Kenneth Benoit (London School of Economics); Prof. Dr. Nello Cristianini (University of Bristol); Prof. Dr. Federico Neresini (University of Padua and Observa Science in Society); Dr. Andrew Hardie (Lancaster University); Dr. Giuseppe Veltri (University of East Anglia); Dr. Savaş Yıldırım (İstanbul Bilgi University); Özcan Çavuş (IBM)

The conference funded by İstanbul Bilgi University, London School of Economics and British Counsil is organized  by Prof. Dr. Ahmet Süerdem from İstanbul Bilgi University Department of Business Administration and Prof. Dr. Martin W. Bauer from London School of Economics.

“I don’t know if we are going to have a choice but to move away from survey research.”
(Donna Goldfarb, vice president of consumer market insights for Unilever Americas, as quoted in Neff, 2008, para. 3).

ICT based research tools such as text mining, sentiment analysis, online media monitoring, information retrieval and computational linguistics are enjoying a lot of excitement and optimism thanks to the increasing popularity of the Web.  These tools are much more cost and time efficient for data collection and analysis compared to the traditional research tools such as surveys. So is the era of the research as we know passing? Has the time come to replace traditional surveys, content analysis and focus groups with the next-generation tools?

However, these next generation tools often simultaneously retrieve both "too little" knowledge and "too much" information. Although these tools can extract huge amount of reliable information in a cost and time efficient manner, to what extend this information represents the knowledge; the construct we are looking for is still problematic.  Alternatively, traditional methods such as surveys, focus groups, and content analysis depend on established methodologies for handling these issues while they usually fall behind the technological bonanza ICT based research communities enjoy. 

The aim of this conference is to bring scholars from both traditional social science methodologies and ICT scholars and experts together in a platform to discuss these issues and what these two apparently different knowledge domains can offer to each other. We are expecting this platform to be a fine starting point to cross-breed the established social science methodology and emerging ICT.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to (with a focus on how to converge ICT based research and classical methodology):

What is media monitoring in the age of the internet and digital media? What is involved in media monitoring?
What are the good practices for web mining, text retrieval and database constitution: probabilistic sampling  or corpus construction Clarifying analytic procedures: Such as content analysis, text classification, topic detection, sentiment analysis through machine learning and text mining Corpus annotation: automatic and interpretive Validation procedures What are the potentials of online media monitoring for complementing sampling based opinion polling and attitude surveys?
Mining digitally available historical texts: Backwards attitude research? Might online media monitoring even present an alternative for sampling based opinion polling and attitude surveys?
What are the issues? Functional equivalence or substantive equivalences?

Conference Program:

January 8, 2013
10:00-17:00    Opening Speech (Prof. Dr. Ahmet Süerdem) and Presentations 

10:00-13:00    Morning Session  (Prof. Dr. Martin W Bauer, Prof. Dr. Federico Neresini, Dr. Andrew Hardie, Dr. Giuseppe Veltri)
13:00-14:00    Lunch
14:00-14:30    IBM’s presentation
14:30-18:00    Afternoon Session (Prof. Dr. Ahmet Süerdem, Prof. Dr. Sophia Ananiadou, Prof. Dr. Kenneth Benoit, Prof. Dr. Nello Cristianini, Dr. Savaş Yıldırım)

January 9, 2013
10:00-14:00     Workshop