Abstract

Automated techniques for image analysis represent a useful tool to broaden the frontiers of social research. The availability of commercial services relieves the researcher from the need to possess the technical and computational skills necessary to develop an algorithm autonomously, greatly expanding the audience of possible users. The following contribution aims to provide to the researchers the tools to understand the different characteristics of the main commercial services available as an instrument of research, while also offering a guide to use them and showing how previous studies have employed the new technique.