Crowd-sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data

TLDR

Empirical social science often relies on data derived from qualitative sources by expert researchers, yet this expert‑driven process is difficult to replicate or assess for reliability. The study aims to use crowd‑sourcing to distribute text for reading and interpretation by many nonexperts, generating results comparable to expert analysis but more quickly and flexibly, thereby shifting focus to reliable, replicable data‑collection methods. Crowd‑sourcing distributes the text to a large pool of nonexperts for reading and interpretation. The approach yields results comparable to expert analysis, is faster and more flexible, produces reproducible and transparently extendable datasets, works across multiple political text types and languages, and suggests broad implications for expert‑generated social science data.

Abstract

Empirical social science often relies on data that are not observed in the field, but are transformed into quantitative variables by expert researchers who analyze and interpret qualitative raw sources. While generally considered the most valid way to produce data, this expert-driven process is inherently difficult to replicate or to assess on grounds of reliability. Using crowd-sourcing to distribute text for reading and interpretation by massive numbers of nonexperts, we generate results comparable to those using experts to read and interpret the same texts, but do so far more quickly and flexibly. Crucially, the data we collect can be reproduced and extended transparently, making crowd-sourced datasets intrinsically reproducible. This focuses researchers’ attention on the fundamental scientific objective of specifying reliable and replicable methods for collecting the data needed, rather than on the content of any particular dataset. We also show that our approach works straightforwardly with different types of political text, written in different languages. While findings reported here concern text analysis, they have far-reaching implications for expert-generated data in the social sciences.