1.4. Topic modeling

Marta Villamor Martin, University of Maryland - Robert H. Smith School of Business 

Marta Villamor Martin is a thirda year Ph.D student at the Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship Department.

She began the Smith PhD Program in Fall 2020. Her research interests include industry evolution, innovation entrepreneurship, and accelerators. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Marta was a business consultant specialized in the financial industry. Marta graduated as the valedictorian from the University of Navarra with a Bachelor’s degree in Management.

Fabian Prieto-Nañez, Virginia Tech University - College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences 

Fabian Prieto-Ñañez is an assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society.

His research and teaching focus on histories of technologies in the Global South, particularly through the lens of media devices and infrastructures. He earned his doctorate in communication and media from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation focused on ideas of piracy, informality and illegality in the use of early satellite dishes in the Caribbean, particularly in Colombia. He also had worked on histories of computing in Latin America.

Description of workshop 

In this workshop, we will briefly explain the fundamentals of Topic Modeling (TM). We will then present an example of how to run a topic modeling and help the audience understand the output of a topic model (we will lively present a step-by-step example of the process to run the topic modeling).

Finally, we will briefly summarize our working project ( a multi-method project combining topic modeling and a historical case) and explain how we came up with the idea of using topic modeling in a historical paper, why TM is a helpful tool, in this case, we will explain the team dynamics, how topic modeling can complement historical cases (how each member of the team “specialized” on a given methodology of the paper and how we influenced and helped each other to improve both our understanding of the history as well as the usefulness of the TM methodology).

After this, we hope to engage with the audience in a Q&A and discussion about the value of this methodology.