About Zelig

2017-05-04

Contact

We love to get feedback on how to improve Zelig.

If you have questions and suggestions improvements, we’d love to hear from you! You can get in touch via:

You can even make your R packages usable from Zelig by writinga few simple bridge functions. Checkout the Developer’s Guide for details.

Team

The Zelig project is based at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Citation


To cite Zelig in publications please use:

Choirat C, Gandrud C, Honaker J, Imai K, King G and Lau O (2017).
_Zelig: Everyone's Statistical Software_. Version 5.1-0.90000,
<URL: http://zeligproject.org/>.

Imai K, King G and Lau O (2008). "Toward A Common Framework for
Statistical Analysis and Development." _Journal of Computational
Graphics and Statistics_, *17*(4), pp. 892-913. <URL:
http://j.mp/msE15c>.

To see these entries in BibTeX format, use 'print(<citation>,
bibtex=TRUE)', 'toBibtex(.)', or set
'options(citation.bibtex.max=999)'.

We also thank all contributors to the Zelig project, including: Vito D’Orazio, Jennifer McGrath, Muhammed Y. Idris, Ista Zhan, Justin Grimmer, Jason Wittenberg, Badri Narayan Bhaskar, Skyler J. Cranmer, Ben Goodrich, Ying Lu, Patrick Lam, Nicholas Carnes, Alexander D’Amour, Delia Bailey, Ferdinand Alimadhi, Elena Villalon, Matt Owen.

Our Name

Zelig (noun) /ˈzɛlɪɡ/ : An entity with chameleon like characteristics, able to change appearance and form to fit appropriately in any circumstance.

Leonard Zelig was born in Brooklyn, New York at the turn of the century into a Jewish immigrant family. He gained notoriety and celebrity status during the 1920s due to his supernatural ability to look and act like whomever was around him. F. Scott Fitzgerald penned in his memoirs of meeting Leonard Zellman, a charming and impeccably dressed aristocrat, at an affluent garden party in Long Island. Lou Zelig turned up soon after at the New York Yankees spring training camp in Florida. Later, he was seen as a member of Al Capone’s Cosa Nostra and a black jazz musician in Chicago. Leonard inspired Woody Allen’s 1983 fictionalized documentary film, Zelig, about this “chameleon man”" who changed his appearance and persona to comfortably blend into his surroundings and integrate himself into important historical events. Similarly, Zelig: Everyone’s Statistical Software is intended to fit in every situation, and to work for every model and approach.