Webpages tagged with «Political Science»
The annual PODS workshop takes place 27 October.
We would like to invite to the final student presentations in the new summer course “Political Data Science Hackathon” (ISSSV1337).
Philipp Broniecki and Bjørn Høyland present their paper on Patterns of Roll-Call Requests in the European Parliament. The presentation will focus on the technical issues involved in shaping, phrasing and organizing information from a large set of semi-structured web-pages.
Martin Søyland (Political Science, UiO) presents his R package stortingscrape. This R package aims to effectivize this process for Norwegian parliamentary data. The package makes the data easily accessible, while also being flexible enough for tailoring the different underlying data sources to ones needs. The package philosophy revolves around three core consepts: 1) simplify data formats as much as possible, 2) make interconnected sources of data easily mergable, and 3) minimize overlap in information for different retrival functions.
Opinion polls are not reported in the media as unfiltered numbers. And some opinion polls are not reported at all. This talk by Zoltán Fazekas from Copenhagen Business School is about how polls travel through several stages that eventually turn boring numbers into biased news. The theoretical framework describes how and why opinion polls that are available to the public are more likely to focus on change, despite most polls showing little to no change. These dynamics are empirically demonstrated using several data sources and measurements from two different democracies (Denmark and the U.K.) covering several years of political reporting. In the end, a change narrative will be prominent in the reporting of opinion polls which contributes to what the general public sees and shares, further consolidating a picture of volatile political competition.
Optical character recognition (OCR) promises to open vast bodies of historical data to scientific inquiry, but OCR can be cumbersome when documents are noisy. The past 18 months have seen the launch of new OCR processors with vastly improved accuracy. In this seminar, Thomas Hegghammer will give an overview of the latest tools and present a new R package that offers access to the most powerful of them all, Google Document AI.
The digitalization of records of political data, historical and current, has the potential to substantively enrich, and challenge, our understanding of political phenomena. The Political Data Science (PODS) research group brings together scholars interested in the collection and exploitation of these new sources of data.