GOOD AND BAD SOCIOLOGY: DOES TOPIC MODELLING MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

The changing social reality, which is increasingly digitally networked, requires new research methods capable of analysing large bodies of data (including textual data). This development poses a challenge for sociology, whose ambition is primarily to describe and explain social reality. As traditional sociological research methods focus on analysing relatively small data, the existential challenge of today involves the need to embrace new methods and techniques, which enable valuable insights into big volumes of data at speed. One such emerging area of investigation involves the application of Natural Language Processing and Machine-Learning to text mining, which allows for swift analyses of vast bodies of textual content. The paper’s main aim is to probe whether such a novel approach, namely, topic modelling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm, can find meaningful applications within sociology and whether its adaptation makes sociology perform its tasks better. In order to outline the context of the applicability of LDA in the social sciences and humanities, an analysis of abstracts of articles published in journals indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database on topic modelling was conducted. This study, based on 1,149 abstracts, showed not only the diversity of topics undertaken by researchers but helped to answer the question of whether sociology using topic modelling is “good” sociology in the sense that it provides opportunities for exploration of topic areas and data that would not otherwise be undertaken.