This talk describes new analysis algorithms for text data aimed at understanding the social world from which the data emerged. The political world offers some excellent questions to explore: Do US presidential candidates "move to the political center" after winning a primary election? Are Supreme Court justices swayed by amicus curiae briefs, documents crafted at great expense? I'll show how our computational models capture theoretical commitments and uncertainty, offering new tools for exploring these kinds of questions and more. Time permitting, we'll close with an analysis of a quarter million biographies, discussing what can be discovered about human lives as well as those who write about them.

The primary collaborators on this research are my Ph.D. students David Bamman and Yanchuan Sim; collaborators from the Political Science Department at UNC Chapel Hill, Brice Acree, and Justin Gross; and Bryan Routledge from the Tepper School of Business at CMU.