In-class activity for my applied research class for communication students. Students work with Yoshikoder software to conduct a sentiment analysis for their project. And this activity is a prep activity to familiarize them with the class concepts and the software.

1. Points:_____
Names:_______________________________________________________
Social Media Monitoring: Computer-Assisted Content Analysis
Work in pairs to complete the below. You’ll need a computer.
To practice the use of computer-assisted content analysis, and so you can learn to use Yoshikoder, let’s
re-analyze our Obama v. Romney data from last class.
Part 1: Getting Started
1) Download the text files for Obama and Romney by clicking the down arrow at:
a. Here I link some Tweets I’ve saved and posted on our Sakai page.
2) Open Yoshikoder
3) Go back to the coding sheet you created from the exercise last class.
Look over your previous coding sheet. There should be 2 categories
“positive” and “negative”
go; federal; debt; economy; liar; love; donate; wonder; happy; lose; win; election; candidate; crap;
choice; best; America; bad; Bin Laden; honest; Obamacare; health care; elect; outsourcing; can’t wait;
extreme; bailout; luck; winner; women; great; sad; believe; future; !; :(; :); awesome; junk; excited
Part 2: Entering Data
Let’s create a coding sheet in Yoshikoder so the computer can run the analysis
1. We’ll enter your “positive” category into Yoshikoder:
2. Click icon:
3. Enter the name “Positive”. You can give it a description if you like.
4. Make sure the term “positive” is highlighted. Now, in the menu, click “Dictionary” -> “Add
Patterns”
5. A window will appear. Enter EVERY keyword in the “positive” category from the exercise last
class. Press enter after EACH keyword.
6. Click Okay when you are done. Your entries should look something like this:
7.
8. Repeat the same process for the “negative” category, creating a new category.
9. Create 2 more categories in addition to positive and negative:
a. Looking at the terms, do you see other topics coming up that could be categories?
i. Example: foreign affairs, the economy, etc.
b. Do so by placing each keyword that fits into the larger category. Then enter them into
Yoshikoder using the same steps from Part 2 above.
Part 3: Analyze The Data
You must import the file(s) you want to analyze.
1. Goto menu: Documents -> Add Documents. Select the Obama and Romney texts you
downloaded. They should now appear on the right:

2. Points:_____
Names:_______________________________________________________
2. Highlight the file you want to analyze.
3. Go to menu: Report - > Apply Dictionary
4. A window will appear.
5. To see the frequency of each keyword in your categories, unclick “Show Categories Only”
6. Repeat the process for the other file.
Part 4: Answer Below Questions with your Partner
Do the counts for both Romney and Obama you get here match what your group came up with in terms
of “positive” and “negative” in the exercise last class? Or was there error? Where were the mistakes
made, if any?
For both Obama and Romney, what did you find for your 2 new categories (what were the counts)?
What can you conclude from the data?
What advantages, if any, does computer assisted content analysis have over doing it by hand (what you
did last class)?
What are the key limitations you are still facing?
Done? Try out some of the other things you can do, to help you prep for your project:
See “Content Analysis with Yoshikoder” handout, the part labeled “Analyzing Data”.