It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce that I managed to defend my Ph.D. thesis at ENSAE, IP Paris, last week. I forgot to take the customary pictures with my committee, so please enjoy the acknowledgments. You can find a summary of the thesis in French and English as well.

Studying a social science will really change how you walk the earth and see society Me, after 11 years of studies: LOL, Coleman cooler, just like the boat/bathtub

SICSS-Paris is on! Today, over 40 scholars from all over Europe (and beyond) gathered at @crestumr.bsky.social for 2 weeks of courses and talks about digital methods and text analysis. And in the evening, @eunjikim.bsky.social gave the first talk on influencers and political change.

Next week, CREST is hosting another edition of the Summer School in Computational Social Science (SICSS). Check out the speakers and participants here: sicss.io/2025/paris/p... and some here: @bartbonikowski.bsky.social @eunjikim.bsky.social @austin-van-loon.bsky.social @dirkhovy.bsky.social

Thank you for coming out and vibing with us and our poster at PAA. The poster session is over now. So if you haven’t stopped by, please feel guilty. Download the preprint and all your sins shall be forgiven (doi.org/10.31235/osf...)

Sarah Williams, Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning at MIT, will be a keynote speaker for #IC2S2 2025 in Norrköping, Sweden. 🎙Urban policy and big data for public good. Learn more: www.ic2s2-2025.org/keynotes/

Post a fictional character who you think would be an antivaxxer. Hard mode: No villains

IC2S2 2025: As many of you have seen, the submission system was temporarily down. It is running again and we extended the deadline to include Feb 26. Please excuse the inconvenience

Among other great locations, Paris will also hold a Summer Institute. This year's focus will be on LLMs and GenAI. Join us!

Prof. Arnout Van de Rijt of Sociology at the European University Institute will be a keynote speaker for #IC2S2 2025 in Norrköping, Sweden. 🎙The long-term effects of good and bad luck on life course achievement. Learn more: ic2s2-2025.org. Stay tuned for more updates!

Interested in a free seminar? To mark our first semester on Bluesky, we’re offering a free seminar from our Spring offerings (through May 31) to one lucky winner. Follow us and repost this message by Monday, February 10 to enter. Winner revealed on Feb. 14—may the odds be in your favor!

IC2S2 2025 has received 23 tutorial proposals—thank you for your excellent proposals! Our review team is at work, and we look forward to announcing the lineup soon. Stay tuned: www.ic2s2-2025.org

🚨 #IC2S2’25 Call for Tutorials deadline is just around the corner—Jan 17, 2025 Don’t miss your chance to shape the computational social science conversation in Norrköping, Sweden. Submit your tutorial proposal now: www.ic2s2-2025.org/submit-tutorial Keynote announcements are coming soon!

NEW WORKING PAPER: CREST's @felixlennert.bsky.social and @ppraeg.bsky.social conduct a machine-learning text analysis of intergenerational mobility perceptions in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom Now on @socarxiv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

I pressed some buttons on my keyboard, had a couple of meetings with Alexi Gugushvili and @ppraeg.bsky.social, and this came out: osf.io/preprints/so... Will probably write a more extensive description of this once I have wrapped up the teaching of this semester and reorganized my life.

Are you a nerd (like me) and want to shorten your loved one's/ones' wait until Christmas? Two unacknowledged AI helpers and I (the triumvirate of code taming) teamed up to program a little Shiny Advent calendar.

Dear all, coming Wednesday, 17/1, at 17.15, we will welcome Alex Kindel (Sciences Po médialab) to our NLP & social sciences seminar. He will talk about his recent work on word embedding association tests. You can follow online. Find more information here: www.css.cnrs.fr/nlp-social-s...

Spent a day recording videos for my "Toolbox CSS" course. All this stuff is online, so if you want to be taught web scraping and text mining by a 27-year-old with a Trainspotting haircut and a weird accent who religiously adheres to the tidyverse style guide, I've got you covered: bit.ly/tool-css

In case you are interested in NLP and how to use it for the social sciences: tomorrow, November 22, we will welcome Isabelle Augenstein in our biweekly seminar. She will talk about “Transparent Cross-Domain Stance Detection.” Check this link for more info: www.css.cnrs.fr/nlp-social-s...

The 2024 Conference of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists will take place May 30–31 2024 in Leipzig, Germany. Please visit our conference website www.sozphil.uni-leipzig.de/en/inas-conf... The call for submissions is now open (until Feb. 16). Happy to hear from you!

Our reading group on NLP & social sciences will welcome Yiwei Luo on Zoom tomorrow, Nov 8, 17.15 (Paris time). She's going to talk about stance detection (arxiv.org/abs/2010.15149). Our website is down right now, but please feel free to contact me if you want to attend. Lots of love to y'all, Felix

CREST Sociology is HIRING! Tenure track or associate professor level, open field! Deadline January 31, 2023! Details here: crest.science/wp-content/u...

Etienne Ollion (on Twitter): Cette semaine au séminaire NLP & Sciences sociales, nous recevons Pierre-Carl Langlais (pour une présentation intitulée "De l’opérationnalisation au fine-tuning : créer des LLM pour l’analyse de corpus en sciences sociales". Détails: css.cnrs.fr/nlp-social-s...

With Étienne Ollion I co-organize a seminar on NLP & social sciences at @crestsociology.bsky.social; we have cool talks every so often and you can find a schedule here: www.css.cnrs.fr/nlp-social-s... (1/2)

before starting beginning the PhD of 3rd year

Repost if you’ve participated in a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science. Let’s get #SICSS Bluesky going!

I'm currently preparing my "toolbox CSS" intro slides and came – again – over this gem of an article. Maybe master's students appreciate this sort of humor, last year's bachelor's didn't even chuckle (source: archive.org/details/Onli...)