This hands-on workshop uses a 2025 Charlottesville City Council meeting that included public comments on encampments and the storge of personal belongings to introduce text analysis. Participants will learn to collect and clean transcript data, conduct keyness and sentiment analysis, and create basic visualizations. We will also examine how AI can support this workflow while considering its limitations and ethical implications. No prior text-analysis experience is required.

Our policy is that we do not record live workshops in order to encourage robust Q&A. However, you can always find the full workshop materials for all of our workshops at: https://library.virginia.edu/data/training/past-workshops which allows you to work through the material at your own pace. We also encourage you to reach out to the instructor at any time for a one-on-one consult, and for specific or general questions about any of the topics we cover.