Replication Data for: Introducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions

<p>This repository contains all materials needed to replicate results presented in the paper <em>"Introducing ReChat: A Lab-in-the-Cloud for Text Discussions"</em> by Xiaoxiao Shen and William Small Schulz.</p>

<p>The results can be reproduced by running the <code>code/analyses.R</code> script, which will rerun all data cleaning, model estimation, analyses, and visualizations from the paper, and which will output all the results presented in the paper.</p>

<p>The results shown in the paper were generated by running this script on an AWS r5d.4xlarge machine (with 16-core CPU and 120 GB memory, though this is significantly greater compute and memory than is necessary), running Ubuntu (18.04) and R (4.2.1), with the following R packages installed:</p>

<ul>
<li><code>dplyr</code> (version 1.1.4) for data manipulation,</li>
<li><code>haven</code> (version 2.5.4) for reading and writing data formats like SPSS, SAS, and Stata,</li>
<li><code>lmtest</code> (version 0.9-40) for diagnostic tests for linear models,</li>
<li><code>lubridate</code> (version 1.9.3) for working with dates and times,</li>
<li><code>moments</code> (version 0.14.1) for calculating moments of a dataset (e.g., skewness and kurtosis),</li>
<li><code>pdftools</code> (version 3.4.0) for extracting text, metadata, and other content from PDF files,</li>
<li><code>psych</code> (version 2.3.6) for psychological and statistical analysis,</li>
<li><code>purrr</code> (version 1.0.2) for functional programming tools,</li>
<li><code>readr</code> (version 2.1.5) for reading rectangular data quickly and efficiently,</li>
<li><code>sandwich</code> (version 3.0-2) for robust covariance matrix estimators,</li>
<li><code>sentimentr</code> (version 2.9.0) for text sentiment analysis,</li>
<li><code>stargazer</code> (version 5.2.3) for creating LaTeX, HTML, and ASCII tables from regression models,</li>
<li><code>stringr</code> (version 1.5.1) for string manipulation,</li>
<li><code>tidyr</code> (version 1.3.1) for tidying data,</li>
<li><code>webshot</code> (version 0.5.5) for taking screenshots of web pages.</li>
</ul>

<p>The R package <code>webshot</code> depends on <code>libpoppler-cpp-dev</code> (version 0.62.0-2ubuntu2.14), which was installed with <code>apt-get</code>, and on running the following line of code after installing the above packages:</p>

<pre><code>Rscript -e "webshot::install_phantomjs()"</code></pre>

<p>Finally, our custom R package <code>rechat</code> (sourced from GitHub under the repository <code>willschulz/rechat</code> with commit hash <code>b68ee000e295cee1442c8a0d1fe3e73a92cae728</code>) is also installed.</p>