Plain text? Transparency in computer-assisted text analysis

In political science, research using computer-assisted text analysis techniques has exploded in the last fifteen years. This scholarship spans work studying political ideology,1 congres-sional speech,2 representational style,3 American foreign policy,4 climate change attitudes,5 media,6 Islamic clerics,7 and treaty making,8 to name but a few. As these examples illustrate, com-puter-assisted text analysis—a prime example of mixed-meth-ods research—allows gaining new insights from long-familiar political texts, like parliamentary debates, and altogether en-ables the analysis to new forms of political communication, such as those happening on social media.