Adam Hughes Archives

A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center.

For our latest research findings, visit pewresearch.org.

All Decoded publications

data science | Sep 17, 2019

Exploring the link between European political parties’ ideology and their popularity on Twitter

It can be hard to determine whether parties near the ends of the ideology scale are more popular on the platform than moderate parties.
data science | Mar 27, 2019

Crowdsourcing a video coding project can be as effective as using trained research assistants

Measuring the content and meaning of videos is an important research goal for social scientists, but the tools for analyzing them at scale lag behind new advances.
data science | Jan 30, 2019

How social scientists can use transfer learning to kick-start a deep learning project

Social scientists are increasingly adopting machine learning methods to analyze large amounts of text, images and other kinds of data.
data science | Aug 28, 2018

Using supervised machine learning to quantify political rhetoric

Several posts on this blog have examined unsupervised methods of natural language processing. These algorithms and models can help…
data science | Jun 27, 2018

Using APIs to collect website data

At Pew Research Center, we regularly use APIs to collect information for the studies we produce. Web APIs provide a means of communication between websites and users, structured by rules.