Dear all,

I am happy to announce the first release of MEXCA (v1.0.0). Developed together with the eScience Center, MEXCA is a tool for Multimodal Emotional eXpression Capture (with the final A for Amsterdam).

You can feed MEXCA a video of for example an election debate. MEXCA identifies who speaks and who is shown in the video. Moreover it binds together state-of-the-art open-source tools to extract facial expressions, vocal characteristics and language tone from the video.

Indeed, its strength is the combination of different existing pipelines. This dramatically reduces the time, costs and complexity of multimodal emotional analyses.   

You can try out MEXCA here: https://github.com/mexca/mexca. You can read our preprint on MEXCA here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/56svb

We are also organizing a short workshop on February 14 (from 9:00 – 13:00 CET). In this workshop we will explain the tool and would like to discuss follow-up steps with participants. Also, we will ask several people who work on emotional expression in politics to present their work. The location is REC B9.22 (the Common Room). You can participate online too. Please send me an email if you want to participate in the workshop. Also feel free to forward this invitation to people you think may be interested.

We would love to hear what you think.

Kind regards,

Dr. Gijs Schumacher

Associate Professor Political Science

University of Amsterdam

Co-Director Hot Politics Lab

Co-Director Challenges to Democratic Representation

Web: gijsschumacher.nl

Twitter: @gijsschumacher