wlowe at gov dot harvard dot edu
I have joined the University of Nottingham to help Cees van der Eijk run the Methods and Data Institute. The Institute offers research methods training and consulting to faculty and postgraduates, primarily from the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences.
My methodological interests centre on statistical text analysis. Substantively I'm interested in the role of identity and rationality in international relations, and in the dynamics of secession and civil war. I am currently working with Ken Benoit and Michael Laver on Wordscores, a new method for automatically assigning policy positions to political texts. Before Wordscores I was involved in the Identity Project, that is working to quantify identity (ethnic, religious, national) using computer-aided content analysis. The Identity Project is a Weatherhead Initiative involving with Iain Johnston, Yoshiko Herrera, Rose McDermott, and Rawi Abdelal. Before that, Gary King and I developed a new evaluation methodology and applied it to an information extraction system that generates events data directly from newswire.
In case you're wondering whether you know me - I wasn't always in political science - here's some personal history. I trained as a philosopher, but quickly lapsed into empirical work by starting a PhD on neural networks and natural language processing at Edinburgh University's late great Centre for Cognitive Science. While working in Richard Shillcock's group, and later under the wing of David Willshaw I wrote a dissertation that used unsupervised neural networks and statistical methods from information retrieval to build a computational model of human semantic memory. I was then Visiting Fellow in Daniel Dennett's Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts. Gary King tempted me into political science, and I've not found any reason to leave.
Somewhere in the Edinburgh part, I also met J. J. Bryson whom I've been following around ever since.