  The plastic deformation of amorphous solids is mediated by localized shear
transformations involving small groups of particles rearranging irreversibly in
an elastic background. We introduce and compare three different computational
methods to extract the size and orientation of these shear transformations in
simulations of a two-dimensional (2D) athermal model glass under simple shear.
We find that the shear angles are broadly distributed around the macroscopic
shear direction, with a more or less Gaussian distribution with a standard
deviation of around 20 $\bullet$ about the direction of maximal local shear.
The distributions of sizes and orientations of shear transformations display no
substantial sensitivity to the shear rate. These results can notably be used to
refine the description of rearrangements in elastoplastic models.
