In this course we develop a model of how language reflects social and psychological dynamics in social media and other technologically-mediated contexts. The course lays out the main stages of analyzing language to understand social dynamics, including using theory to identify key discourse features, feature extraction, and classification and prediction. The course will draw on action-oriented language approaches to understand how people use language (e.g., grounding and joint action models), and then build on this approach to understand how discourse features from natural language can be used to answer questions from a wide range of social science questions, and ultimately, to the design of new technologies.
3-5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
In this course we develop a model of how language reflects social and psychological dynamics in social media and other technologically-mediated contexts. The course lays out the main stages of analyzing language to understand social dynamics, including using theory to identify key discourse features, feature extraction, and classification and prediction. The course will draw on action-oriented language approaches to understand how people use language (e.g., grounding and joint action models), and then build on this approach to understand how discourse features from natural language can be used to answer questions from a wide range of social science questions, and ultimately, to the design of new technologies.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.