Professor Ken Benoit and his team have been awarded the prestigious 2020 Society for Political Methodology Statistical Software Award for the ‘quanteda’ software package. His team, comprised of Kohei Watanabe, Haiyan Wang, Paul Nulty, Adam Obeng, Stefan Müller, and Akitaka Matsuo, recieved the award for the quanteda software.

The below is an excerpt from The Society for Political Methodology:

"quanteda provides a comprehensive workflow for processing and analyzing textual data in R that integrates existing text packages and tools under a single umbrella. quanteda supports the entire text-as-data workflow, enabling researchers to manage large datasets and perform a wide array of analysis and visualization tasks. Its extraordinary documentation not only makes it accessible for researchers from a variety of backgrounds, it also facilitates the further creation of packages and utilities, and supports its usage in teaching and training. An emphasis on efficiency and parallelization mean that quanteda will be maintainable over time, while it also continues to be under active and continuous development with plans to integrate with emerging deep learning methods and packages. quanteda's innovation, accessible documentation, and functionality are testaments to the collaborative efforts of both junior and senior scholars that can serve as a model for future software development."

Documentation, vignettes, and tutorials are available on the project website