Politicians can increase the appeal of their speeches through nonverbal cues such as gestures and vocal emphasis. Understanding the factors that make political speech appealing is central to political science research, yet studying nonverbal cues during political speech is difficult due to their audiovisual nature. In this workshop, you learn how to analyse politicians' body language in video recordings using pose estimation---a class of computer vision models that locate and trace human body key points, such as hands, ellbows, and shoulders throughout videos. We will keep the technical introduction brief, focusing instead on hands-on implementation of pose estimation and learning how the resulting data can be used to meaningfully quantify gestures in political speech.
