Scholars increasingly use machine learning techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to reduce the dimensionality of textual data and to study discourse in collective bodies. However, measures of discourse based on algorithmic results typically have no intuitive meaning or obvious...

Many private and public institutions depend on reasoned discourse to reach decisions. Before collective action, before voting, tends to come reasoned discourse, at least in aspiration. Reformers commonly call for increases in the transparency of collective decision-making, lobbying for instance...

Videoconferencing has recently become ubiquitous due to the COVID-19 pandemic but has been growing in importance for decades. Despite this growth, we have limited understanding of the costs associated with adopting this technology. In this paper I leverage a novel dataset tracking 1.7 million...