You’ve reached Will Lowe’s homepage. I am a political methodologist specializing in statistical text analysis with applications to international relations and comparative politics. Formally I’m Senior Researcher at Eurodata in the MZES, part of the University of Mannheim.

Details of what I write about and the things I teach can be found in the links above. You can find also find me answering questions on stats.stackexchange.com, writing code on GitHub, R-Forge and Sourceforge, and perhaps inevitably wittering on Twitter. There’s a blog here too. Alternatively you can ponder some biographical stuff, or just a picture.

News

The site has a new domain reflecting the fact that I am conjugateprior in most parts of the web, and also a new style that is hopefully not much more visually exciting than the last one. If the change broke a link that you were particularly fond of, perhaps to a password protected course materials page, just drop me a line and I’ll tell you where that material now lives.

If you work with event data you might reasonably wonder a) how best to wrangle it into a shape you can work with, and b) where those conflict-cooperation scales that everybody seems to use come from. I suggest the events R package for event data wrangling, and a new paper on event data analysis for a way to think about inducing conflict scales and working with the resulting time series.

Since semantic space / distributional approaches to lexical semantics seem to be trendy again I’ve linked my publications on that topic on the publications page. Someone might find them useful.