Impact & Society, Data Analysis Heather Estop Impact & Society, Data Analysis Heather Estop

Emotion and reason in political language

In the day-to-day of political communication, politicians constantly decide how to amplify or constrain emotional expression, in service of signalling policy priorities or persuading colleagues and voters. We propose a new method for quantifying emotionality in politics using the transcribed text of politicians’ speeches. This new approach, described in more detail below, uses computational linguistics tools and can be validated against human judgments of emotionality.

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Impact & Society Chris Burnage Impact & Society Chris Burnage

Istanbul as a regional computational social science hub

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) Istanbul was originally conceived in Oxford and Helsinki. Our co-organizer, Akin Unver, and the principal data scientist tutor, Ahmet Kurnaz of SICSS-Istanbul met at Oxford University in 2017 during their joint research project on how best to use data science to gather data from hard-to-access regions such as disaster areas or war zones. From this project arose the need to launch a data science summer school in Istanbul. Our teaching assistant (Yunus Emre Tapan) was then a participant at the SICSS-Helsinki, run by our other co-organizer, Matti Nelimarkka, and also discussed the possibility of launching an Istanbul chapter. Later in 2018, Akin and Emre met at the International Studies Association annual meeting for the first time and agreed to launch SICSS-Istanbul.

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What a year...Here are our top posts of 2020: From text mining tools in the social sciences to running online experiments and visualizing COVID-19 data

The SAGE Ocean Blog started the year off with a piece on our recently published white paper on software tools for social science. Next week we’ll publish a piece from senior product manager Daniela Duca on the challenges of running social science experiments from home and what tools can help. The move to online teaching, learning, and research feature heavily in our top posts of 2020. Back in April Katie Metzler wrote about the challenge COVID-19 to student research projects and in May, Jason Radford provided some helpful recommendations for translating studies into an online format and recruiting virtual participants.

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