Automated Content Analysis

Automated content analysis is the computational measurement of text features at a scale impossible by hand, using natural-language processing and machine learning to classify, scale, or discover the content of large corpora. Synthesized for the social sciences by Grimmer and Stewart's 2013 'Text as Data,' it spans supervised classification, unsupervised discovery, and scaling, all unified by the principle that automated methods augment but do not replace careful human judgment and validation.