Psychological Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities

Abstract

In the digital humanities, it has been particularly difficult to establish the psychological properties of a person or group of people in an objective, reliable manner. Traditionally, the attempt to understand an author’s psychological makeup has been primarily (if not exclusively) accomplished through subjective interpretation, qualitative analysis, and speculation. In the world of empirical psychological research, however, the past two decades have witnessed an explosion of computerized language analysis techniques that objectively measure psychological features of the individual. Indeed, by using modern text analysis methods, it is now possible to quickly and accurately extract information about people—personalities, individual differences, social processes, and even their mental health—all through the words that people write and speak. This chapter serves as a primer for researchers interested in learning about how language can provide powerful insights into the minds of others via well-established and easy-to-use psychometric methods. First, this chapter provides a general background on language analysis in the field of psychology, followed by an introduction to modern methods and developments within the field of psychological text analysis. Finally, a solid foundation to psychological text analysis is provided in the form of an overview of research spanning hundreds of studies from labs all over the world.