The use of geospatial data – data that can be mapped using geographic information systems (GIS) – has become increasingly widespread in the social sciences. Applications not only extend to the analysis of classical geographical entities (e.g., policy diffusion across spatially proximate countries) but increasingly also to analyses of micro-level data, ...

Generalized additive models (GAMs) have become an important tool for modeling data flexibly. These models are generalized linear models where the outcome variable depends on unknown smooth functions of some predictor variables, and ...

Images are an increasingly used data source in the social sciences. One application is to extract features from human faces using machine learning algorithms. This blog post provides a guide on using APIs for this task, specifically how to ...

The interpretation and presentation of empirical findings from (generalized) linear models has come a long way in the social sciences. Researchers increasingly visualize substantively meaningful quantities of interest such as expected values,...

R is a great resource for data management, statistics, analysis, and visualization — and it becomes better every day. This is to a large part because of the active community that continuously creates and builds extensions for the R world. If you want to contribute to this community, writing a package ...

R is a great resource for data management, statistics, analysis, and visualization — and it becomes better every day. This is to a large part because of the active community that continuously creates and builds extensions for the R world. If you want to contribute to this community, writing a package ...

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 ...

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 ...

Whether researchers occasionally turn to Bayesian statistical methods out of convenience or whether they firmly subscribe to the Bayesian paradigm for philosophical reasons: The use of Bayesian statistics in the social sciences is becoming increasingly widespread. However, seemingly high entry costs still keep many applied researchers from embracing Bayesian methods. ...

Whether researchers occasionally turn to Bayesian statistical methods out of convenience or whether they firmly subscribe to the Bayesian paradigm for philosophical reasons: The use of Bayesian statistics in the social sciences is becoming increasingly widespread. However, seemingly high entry costs still keep many applied researchers from embracing Bayesian methods. ...

Everyone is talking about text analysis. Is it puzzling that this data source is so popular right now? Actually no. Most of our datasets rely on (hand-coded) textual information. Extracting, processing, and analyzing this oasis of information becomes increasingly relevant for a large variety of research fields. This Methods Bites ...

Everyone is talking about text analysis. Is it puzzling that this data source is so popular right now? Actually no. Most of our datasets rely on (hand-coded) textual information. Extracting, processing, and analyzing this oasis of information becomes increasingly relevant for a large variety of research fields. This Methods Bites ...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, together with its sibling, the collaboratively edited knowledge base Wikidata, provides incredibly rich yet largely untapped sources for political research. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Denis Cohen and Nick Baumann offer a hands-on recap of Simon Munzert’s (Hertie School of Governance) workshop materials to show ...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, together with its sibling, the collaboratively edited knowledge base Wikidata, provides incredibly rich yet largely untapped sources for political research. In this Methods Bites Tutorial, Denis Cohen and Nick Baumann offer a hands-on recap of Simon Munzert’s (Hertie School of Governance) workshop materials to show ...

How can we infer actors’ positions, substantive topics, or sentiments from (political) texts? This Methods Bites Tutorial by Julian Bernauer summarizes Denise Traber’s workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Spring 2018. Using exemplary sets of political documents (election manifestos and coalition agreements), it showcases tools of QTA ...

How can we infer actors’ positions, substantive topics, or sentiments from (political) texts? This Methods Bites Tutorial by Julian Bernauer summarizes Denise Traber’s workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Spring 2018. Using exemplary sets of political documents (election manifestos and coalition agreements), it showcases tools of QTA ...

How can we infer actors’ positions, substantive topics, or sentiments from (political) texts? This Methods Bites Tutorial by Julian Bernauer summarizes Denise Traber’s workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Spring 2018. Using exemplary sets of political documents (election manifestos and coalition agreements), it showcases tools of QTA ...