TEXT MINING IS THE ESSENTIAL TOOL
One of the potential questions our group is considering to research is “How common is it for a president to break his promises made during the presidential campaign?” In order to answer this question and draw the parallels between current and historian elections, we would have to process quite large amount of text and find just the information that we need to prove our historian question. Text mining will be the essential tool in our analyses.
We will use lexical analyses that are based on searching of the key words in candidates’ speeches to find out the major promises that they made during their presidential campaign. Also, we will look for frequency of their promises – that is how often in their debates, interviews, speeches and other public appearances do they repeat these promises. Sometimes we may identify a certain patterns in their speeches that are related to their promises.
Then, we are going to compare the information that we gathered about campaign promises with the real actions these candidates made once they are elected to the presidential office. By doing this, our goal is to find out if it is common in politics for presidential candidates to make false promises to the voters, and if the voters can trust these candidates.
I agree that tackling the question you pose here would agree processing very large amounts of data, and text mining could be a tool to help make sense of that data. I do think you and your group need to think about refining your question so that the scope does not become too unwieldy. I am concerned that this could be difficult to do if the boundaries are not clearly defined. For instance, what qualifies as a campaign promise? Anything the candidate says during campaign season to anyone? Just what the candidate adopts from the party platform? Clarifying such questions will inform analysis of all kinds, including data analysis. For text mining, you will also face technological challenges–for example, what word patterns will represent a “promise” by a candidate?