The Program in Statistics and Methodology (PRISM) invites you to lunch and a workshop on Methods for Using Audiovisual Data in Research. Our presenter is Myriam Shiran, Postdoctoral Fellow in Socio-Political Analysis and AI.
Title: Using Audiovisual Data in Research: The Case of State Supreme Court Oral Arguments
Abstract: Video recordings are increasingly available, including those of federal, state, and local government proceedings, yet underutilized in social science research. This workshop covers collecting, processing, and analyzing audiovisual data to capture nonverbal characteristics and paralinguistic features of political communication, using the California Supreme Court oral arguments as a use case. We will walk through a pipeline that includes data collection, transcription, speaker diarization, gesture recognition, and large language model classification to answer substantive questions about court proceedings, and we will discuss the practical challenges researchers face. The goal is to introduce scholars to video archives as a primary data source for studying elite behavior, deliberation, and institutional dynamics.