Computationally Analyzing Politicians’ Body Language Using Pose Estimation

Politicians can increase the appeal of their speeches through nonverbal cues such as gestures and vocal emphasis. Understanding the factors that make political speech appealing is central to political science research, yet studying nonverbal cues during political speech is difficult due to their audiovisual nature. Pose estimation models—a class of computer vision models that locate and trace human body key points, such as hands, ellbows, and shoulders throughout videos—offer a valuable opportunity to computationally assess politicians’ body language in video recordings. Continue reading

Teaching Quantitative Social Science in Times of COVID-19: How to Generate and Distribute Individualized Exams with R and RMarkdown

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced universities around the globe to switch from on-site teaching to online teaching. As a consequence, quantitative social science classes that previously relied on closed-book in-class exams now have to administer open-book take-home exams. A downside of this switch is that it becomes impossible to monitor compliance with no-collaboration rules. Individualizing exam prompts can prevent students from sharing digital answers while taking the exam. Yet generating, distributing, and correcting individualized exams can be highly time consuming unless the procedure is automated. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Denis Cohen, Marcel Neunhoeffer and Oliver Rittmann present an approach for the automated generation of individualized exam prompts and solution sheets, along with their automated distribution via email, using R and RMarkdown. Continue reading

Efficient Data Management in R

The software environment R is widely used for data analysis and data visualization in the social sciences and beyond. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly popular as a tool for data and file management. Focusing on these latter aspects, this Methods Bites Tutorial by Marcel Neunhoeffer, Oliver Rittmann and our team members Denis Cohen and Cosima Meyer illustrates the workflow and best practices for efficient data management in R. Continue reading