News / January 16, 2025

Workshop at SSWR 2025: Analyzing social media data with NLP

At the SSWR Annual Conference in Seattle, SIG co-conveners Nari Yoo (University of Michigan) and Cheng Ren (University at Albany, SUNY), with Gaurav Sinha (University of Georgia), led a workshop on analyzing social media data for social work research using natural language processing.

The session walked participants through two core NLP techniques, sentiment analysis and topic modeling, and how to apply them to social media data for social work questions: what communities are saying, how discourse shifts over time, and what themes structure text corpora too large to read by hand.

Workshops like this are part of the SIG’s aim to lower the barrier to computational methods for social work researchers, whatever their prior programming experience. Watch the news page for future workshops.