Getting Started with Arabic Text Analysis
Reading recommendations:

• Text Analysis for When You Can't Be There. Advice for the APSA MENA Virtual Research Methods workshop 2021.
• What Counting Words Can Teach Us about Middle East Politics.
• Computer Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics.
• Chapter 5 of Deadly Clerics.
• Women's Authority in Patriarchal Social Movements: The Case of Female Salafi Preachers.

• Code, data and slides from a 5-day workshop on Arabic Text Analysis at Cairo University, Spring 2019.

Arabic Stemmer for Text Analysis
I developed a stemmer for Arabic text analysis for the text analysis in my book, Deadly Clerics. I primarly use it in R, where it is publicly available as the "arabicStemR" package (example code). It is also part of the txtorg utility for text analysis workflow, and I've implemented a Python version (on the txtorg github page, or upon request). The stemmer is loosely based on the light 10 stemmer, but with a number of modifications. I need to improve the documentation, but here is the CRAN manual and a description of what the stemmer actually changes and removes.

If you use the stemmer, please cite: Nielsen, Richard A. 2017. Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad. Cambridge University Press.

Arabic Unicode in R
Some example code for getting Unicode strings into and out of R.

Arabic Typesetting in Latex
Some tricks for type-setting Arabic in latex (I hacked some of this together in 2010, but updated with help from David Romney and Gary King in 2014). If you want a choice of fonts, the flexible way is through XeTeX, a Latex-like program that comes free with most distributions of Tex. An example is here: .zip. The Arabtex package offers an alternative if you like the particular font it supports: .zip. You can also use unicode to place Arabic text in R figures: .txt.

Advice: Applying to Grad School

• My advice in 10 minutes (plus insights from Steven Brooke and May Darwich) -- "Demystifying the PhD Application Process," hosted by POMEPS Professional Development Seminars. Or read my notes.
• Advice for PhD applicants from Chris Blattman.

Advice: Surviving Grad School (and beyond)

• So You're a Grad Student Now? Maybe You Should Do This by Gary King. This advice got me through grad school.
• Overcoming Barriers to Women’s Advancement in Political Science by Amy Catalinac
• Being a Grad Student by Arthur Spirling.
• Tom's Comments: Advice about Graduate School, Finding a Job, Reaching Tenure in Political Science and other Social Sciences, and All of the Steps in Between by Tom Carsey.
• Tips for PhD Students by Claes Backman.
• Tips 4 Economists from Masayuki Kudamatsu.

Advice: Job Market

• "Trial by Fire: Surviving the Job Talk Q&A," by Ron Hassner
• "Job Talks: A Talk," by Arthur Spirling
• "A Job Talk Talk," by Tom Pepinsky (links to more advice within)
• Campus visit guide by Dan De Kadt
• Training Computational Social Science PhD Students for Academic and Non-Academic Careers, Kesari et al 2023

Advice: Everything

• How to Live in Paradise:A Guide for New and Disgruntled Professors and also other advice by David Evans.

Advice: the candid stuff for my PhD students (email me for the passwords)

• Advice for working with me as an advisor
• Advice for getting through grad school
• Advice for publishing in grad school
• Advice for research pipelines
• Advice for the job market
• Advice for a campus interview
• Advice for new professors
• Advice for first book authors

Text Analysis Intro
Some R code that illustrates basic text analysis, along with some slides. Also, I put together an example of how to use the caret package in R for text analysis: .zip.

Web Scraping Examples
A quick example of web-scraping using python that I wrote up for someone: .zip. Not sure you'll like Python? Try this testimonial.

Hack for Updating R
A script to make it less annoying to re-install all my packages after updating R. Steps: (1) Before installing the new update, open your current version of R; (2) Open a new R Editor window and paste in the code; (3) Change the directory in line 3 to your preferred directory for saving a txt file; (4) run the script. This will produce a file called myRpacks.txt that contains R code for re-installing your packages; (5) close the old R and install the new R; (6) Open new R and paste the contents of myRpacks.txt into the command line to install your packages.

Code Snippets A few code snippets that I've found useful. They're posted here mostly so I can remember where to find them.

Mahalanobis distance matrix code (fast!)

Defend against R matrices turning into vectors when only one row is left: mm <- matrix(3,3,3); is.matrix(mm[1,]); is.matrix(mm[1,,drop=F])

Make prettier plot axes (from Carlisle Rainey's compactr library):
axis(2,at=c(0,250,500),labels=F,las=2,cex.axis=.5, tck = -0.02)
axis(2,at=c(0,250,500),labels=T,las=2,cex.axis=.5, tck = F, line=-.08, lwd=0)

Open a pdf you just made in R: system(paste(getOption('pdfviewer'),'mypdf.pdf'))

Remove all but one object in your workspace: rm(list=setdiff(ls(), "x"))

Arabic Text Analysis Workshop, Cairo University, 2019.
[Code and Data]
[Slides]
[Additional Resources]
[workspace_for_topic_models.RData]