Author Archives: Josh Sowalsky

About Josh Sowalsky

Josh Sowalsky is the Director of User Support at Texifter, where he has worked since September 2010. He holds two degrees in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from UMASS Amherst, where he minored in History, Arabic, and International Relations. While at UMASS Josh designed and taught an advanced course that examined the intersection of technological development and national identity formation. Serving also as a research assistant in the UMASS Political Science department, he researched and published articles on electoral politics and political dissent in Jordan. Josh has conducted and presented multilingual field research on civil society development, democratization, and national identity formation throughout the Middle East - namely in Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. His honors thesis was entitled, "The Role of Women's Rights NGOs in Syrian Democratization." When not managing projects in QDAP or harvesting Arabic protest tweets in DiscoverText, Josh can be found strumming a ukulele, exploring Netflix, or swinging aimlessly at tennis balls.

Analyzing Co-Occurrences

A common question we hear at Texifter is, “How can one derive co-occurrences in a slice of data?” DiscoverText makes this process relatively easy – when starting with one known variable. For instance, one might like to see which hashtags … Continue reading

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Election Analytics Part I: Romney Trends in April

[In the coming  months leading up the U.S. presidential election, the Texifter blog will be featuring a multi-part series on various analytical insights into the election, which can be gained by utilizing a host of social media analytics (SMA) methods within … Continue reading

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As Syria Falls, Russia Rises…on Twitter

Bordering Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, Syria has served as a linchpin of geopolitical stability in the Middle East for decades. In spite of its many years of single-party dictatorial rule, its track-record of Lebanese encroachment, and its continuous … Continue reading

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Weibo Arrives @DiscoverText

After months of user anticipation, the Weibo API is now integrated into DiscoverText, our “do-it-yourself” text analytic solution for deriving insight from unstructured text. With over 300 million users, Weibo is the largest micro-blogging website in China. Its integration into … Continue reading

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200 Million Document Milestone

Only a few months ago, DiscoverText’s data ingest counter was steadily moving toward 100 million documents. This week, the software’s document ingest counter will cross the 200 million document line. You can see this for yourself on our homepage. With … Continue reading

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DiscoverText Introduces Tools for Random Sampling

DiscoverText is rolling-out an addition to its analytical toolkit: random sampling. The Web-service already offers an array of tools for text analytics and rigorous, team-based qualitative data analysis. These functions include the ability to code and annotate text, measure inter-rater … Continue reading

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Apple Shake-Up, Part II: Tweets in Memoriam

On October 5th, the passing of Steve Jobs rocked the world. Millions were touched by the loss of one of the world’s great innovators who has firmly joined the ranks of Guttenberg, Franklin, and Edison. Over the 24 hours following … Continue reading

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The Crazy Life of a Tweet

On the evening of May 1st, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. Over the following hours (and days), bin Laden was mentioned by millions across the twitterverse. Among the first of those tweets came from a young, gay, homeschooled … Continue reading

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The Apple Shake-Up: Part I

For Apple, last week will be remembered as one of its toughest and finest on record, and not just for its tumultuous stock prices, but for the staggering range of emotions that the company evoked throughout the week. The week began with … Continue reading

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22,348 bin Laden Tweets: Coded!

It took all of three days for 27 individuals from around the country (and maybe the world) to collectively code 22,348 Tweets that mentioned Osama bin Laden, following his assassination. This crowdsourcing feat, sponsored by the Qualitative Data Analysis Program … Continue reading

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Hurtigruten: A Norwegian Social Media Phenomenon

Here at Texifter, we are regularly impressed by the many ways in which our increasing number of end-users discover new ways to apply DiscoverText’s capabilities to their own research. With each new success story, we are – once again – … Continue reading

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FB Graph API Revisited

Following the blog post about oddities in the Facebook importing that Stu was experiencing while visiting the DMI summer school, I put on my detective hat and went looking for possible reasons why things that should be available from the … Continue reading

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Monitor Middle East Protests

Dear faithful users and intrigued future users of DiscoverText, My name’s Josh and I’m one of 3 user support specialists at Texifter LLC. For my first Texifter blog entry, I’m going to demonstrate how I’ve been using DiscoverText to capture … Continue reading

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A Classifier for the Masses

DiscoverText took a leap forward a few weeks ago with the addition of a beta text classifier from the developers over at uClassify (www.uclassify.com). Integration of this tool into a one-of-a-kind active-learning system inside DiscoverText allows users to create and … Continue reading

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