Text Network Analysis: A Concise Review of Network Construction Methods

A concise, methodical guide, from research question definition to network structure estimation.

Image 1. Text network plot via Textnets. Image by author

Introduction

This article explores the strategies for constructing network structures from text data. It is the second part of the series on text network analysis in Python. As a prior, please read my opening article that describes the main concepts of text network analysis (the article is here). We will follow the steps defined by (Borsoom et al., 2021) and briefly introduced in the previous article.

Image 2. Schematic representation of the workflow used in network approaches. Adapted from Borsoom et al., (2021). Image by draw.io

Further steps beyond defining the research question depend on the structure of our data. Therefore the key question to ask right at the beginning is: What’s the input to the network model?

We might work with:

• raw, unprocessed data
• cleaned data with nodes-edges structure

We can also turn the first into the second one and transform the raw data, clean it and create the nodes-edges structure.

1. Building a network…