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Bruce Desmarais

@brucedesmarais.bsky.social
152 followers 132 following 11 posts

Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State

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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
MAPOR is running a free summer webinar series on AI for survey research. Looks great! Free for students & members: mapor.org/2026-summer-webinar-series/
MAPOR 2026 Summer Webinar Series page: AI Applications for Survey Research
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Less than a week until the PolMeth application deadline! I'm on the program committee, and look forward to reviewing submissions. If you're developing new methods or applying sophisticated approaches to substantive political questions, submit your work. Funds are available to support some attendees.
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
An essay in Science asks whether AI might replace grad students. I sympathize, but in my career, the pattern isn't students just catching up to me, they leapfrog me with newer methods. When the state of the art moves fast, that matters even more. So I won't be replacing grad students with AI.
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
For most of my career, research feedback was scarce. Now with AI-based review I can run a paper through a well-configured Claude project and get helpful substantive review at near-zero cost. The new problem isn't getting feedback, it's knowing when to stop seeking it. How are others managing this?
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Adopting Inferential Network Analysis for my network analysis class next semester. Checked Amazon and discovered we've been critiqued for incompatibility with Bayes' theorem. How many Amazon reviews in history have invoked Bayes? We might be in rare company. 📊😂 Would love to hear more.
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Not a bad way to kick off spring break. Yesterday we got word that "The Structure and Accelerators of International Treaty Cascades" was accepted at International Studies Quarterly. Olga Chyzh led this one, and we started it eight years ago. Eight!
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Our team just published the Digitally Accountable Public Representation (DAPR) Data: an archive of social posts by U.S. elected officials. It includes 1. Data from 28,000+ U.S. elected officials 2. Text from 5.7M tweets & 450k Facebook posts 3. 2020–2024 coverage 4. doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 24/08/2025
We are very excited to have this out!
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
I had the fortune to help organize, speak at, and participate in, the second Open Scholarship Bootcamp at Penn State. The sessions emphasize resources that are helpful to maintaining open scientific workflows. Materials are openly available here! penn-state-open-science.github.io/bootcamp-202...
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Reposted by Bruce Desmarais
Israel Sergio Waismel-Manor @israelwaismelmanor.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
1/ 📢 New in Journal of Information Technology & Politics (OA): What if the biggest barrier to political participation isn’t apathy or ideology— but poor website design? We used eye-tracking to study how parties’ websites widen the digital divide. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Navigating participation: how website design impacts the digital divide in political engagement
Over the last two decades political parties and candidates have shifted many of their functions and activities online. As individuals differ greatly in their technological competence, this shift ge...
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Bruce Desmarais @brucedesmarais.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
I’m thrilled to share new work out in Social Networks! In this project, randomly allocating students to teams permitted identifying causal effects of co-membership. Thanks to Sarah Gordon, Wayne Baker, Jose Uribe, and Cassandra Chambers for bringing me on! Ful article: 📄 lnkd.in/e9TyvnRX
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