Ben Healey: text analytics and tobacco control

Ben has been doing data sciencey work since 1999 for organisations in the banking, retailing, pharmaceutical and education industries. He is currently on contracts with Pharmac and Aspire2025 (a Tobacco Control research collaboration) where, happily, he gets to use his data-wrangling powers for good.

This talk will focus on analysing text, with Tobacco Control as the context. Examples include monitoring mentions of NZ's smokefree goal by politicians and examining media uptake of BATNZ's Agree/Disagree PR campaign. We'll cover common obstacles during data extraction, cleaning and analysis, along with the key Python and R packages you can use to help clear them.