Our research group (made up of physicists and computer scientists) needs to evaluate the political content of short pieces of text. To this end we've constructed a rubric for classification, ranging from strong left, lean left, and neutral, to lean right, strong right, and unclassifiable. While the criteria of the rubric are rather clear cut (a 'strong' classified sentence would contain attacks on a person or group's character, hyperbolic language, or intense / fanatical expressions of support for an issue), we all suspect that this is a solved problem. I've heard this referred to by political scientists as 'coding' text, and it definitely falls within the domain of qualitative content analysis, but I'm yet to find anything specifically on evaluating political text. This in mind, can anyone point me towards an established metric for evaluating the political content of bodies of text? Thanks kindly, Michael Conover