How can we probe deeper in social texts?

The Odycceus project tracks opinion dynamics and the emergence of conflict through social media and text. It is developing a platform for this purpose, Penelope, that allows a social science researcher to combine different textual resources, for example twitter data or newspaper commentaries, and apply various methods of analysis obtained through crowdsourcing. This talk first gives an overview of the platform and which components have been added so far. A crucial step in the pipeline is textual analysis. But out of necessity, most text analysis today uses quite shallow methods, ignoring most of the grammar and the semantics of what is written. Here I raise the issue in how far we can and should go deeper to capture the meaning of text and how this would improve social analysis.