I've been testing the accuracy of LLMs in transcribing printed and handwritten historical texts stored as images. I put together a corpus of 400 pages from the Library of Congress. Current leader is GPT4.1-mini, which at 11 cents per 1K pages, is also the cheapest option. github.com/nealcaren/In...

It used to be much easier to get a faculty position.

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

This is an incredible data source!

@asa-cbsm.bsky.social #contentiousky #CBSM2025 🧵 Some take-aways about protest and social movements. (1) Protest movements have opponents, who will fight back if they lose, things are never settled. (2) You protest when you are in a losing position, of course protest does not always win 1/

I just realized that AJS articles are sorted within each issue by the number of authors and then alphabetically by the first author.

Do you want to visit Chile and meet other labor market and inequality researchers? Submit your paper to our International Workshop in December! We are honored to have @kateweisshaar.bsky.social and Ben Schoefer as keynote speakers. Submit here: www.lm2c2.cl/call-for-pap...

For the @puddingviz.bsky.social, I explored which animals we gender, and why. Come for the extremely cute interactive viz of animals, stay for the extremely nerdy etymology of the ladybug. Story: pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

Here's a summary of some of our top findings from our study of the #NoKings Day-of-Action across the 3 samples we collected. Check it out for some consistent themes across hosts, national participants, and at the flagship event where we surveyed in Philly: danarfisher.com/2025/06/28/w...

Data collection is underway with the hosts for the 1000+ events scheduled across the US for the #NoKings day of action. If you're organizing an event, please fill out the survey when asked: our findings will only be as good as the data we collect 💪 @indivisible.org @sarahdohl.bsky.social

UNC's BOT has belatedly, and after public outcry, approved the pending tenure cases. While I am relieved for my colleagues who were held in limbo, our issues here are far from settled. @insidehighered.com obtained board member's emails - hoo boy, buckle up 1/ www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Thanks to WRAL for covering the very disappointing decision of the UNC-CH Board of trustees to defer considering granting tenure to faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences whose teaching and scholarship has passed all other levels of review. www.wral.com/news/educati...

This is shameful. The UNC Board of Trustees fails to vote on all tenure cases in Arts & Sciences, holding faculty in limbo without any explanation or timeline. This affects both assistant profs up for tenure and new tenured hires. www.chronicle.com/article/at-c...

💣💥2025 COSMOS Summer school: Studying protest. Methodological practices in social movement research When? 8-13th Sept Where? In beautiful Cortona, Italy Deadline to apply: 31st May NO TUITION FEES Keynotes: Donatella della Porta & David A. Snow All info: cosmos.sns.it/all-events/2...

Somehow the Social Security Administration still has the resources to release name counts for last year. Here's a quick thread on name trends. /1

New preprint from @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @mattwilkens.bsky.social, and myself tests different ways of simulating the past with LLMs. We don't fully answer the title question here—just show that simple strategies based on prompting and fine-tuning are insufficient. +

If you're an underfunded org or activist doing (broadly speaking) antifascist work and you've got a data-making or data-analysis idea but not the skills to implement it, let's talk! I've got those skills but no job, so I've got time as well. Happy to add expertise and labor to the right efforts.

As we were writing this paper the NSF ADVANCE program was "archived" (cancelled). A heavy moment for us mid-paper. The results are important - check it out: ADVANCE is one of the (if not the) longest running NSF programs, and, unusually for the NSF, is a collaboration among multiple directorates. 🧵

New blog post: Turning Congressional Job Listings Into Data Using LLM I had 10 years' worth of weekly House job listings as PDFs. Now they are structured JSON, thanks to the Python library llm and LLMs. thescoop.org/archives/202...

I ballparked estimates of a 15% cap on NIH indirects based on awards granted in 2024 (which is different from funded in 2024). My numbers are less than NIH's, but still pretty devastating, including $250 million loss for North Carolina institutions. nih-funding-direct.vercel.app

Recently, UNC Press authors have had their US visas revoked and talks canceled. For over 100 years, we have stood for academic freedom and open discourse, and continue to do so. Read more on the UNC Press Blog ⬇️

Found one! [The AI Overview is based on the plot of a pretty great episode of AP Bio.]

Jesse Jackson's "I am Somebody" from season 3 of Sesame Street (1972). www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTB1...

Delighted to be featured in this great WP piece by @andrewvandam.bsky.social today: "‘Kindergarten Cop’ lied to us. This is the real single-parent capital of America" www.washingtonpost.com/business/202... (Don't know why a sea lions image came up here! 🦭🤷🏾‍♀️ 😂) #sociologysky #policysky

Jo Freeman reached #1 on Hacker News today. Surprisingly, the non-relational database joke wasn't even the top comment.

We switched from MailChimp to beehiiv.com for our quarterly Moby newsletter. Better design tools and painless setup. Slightly higher Open and Click through rates. Plus, it's free since we have < 2,500 subscribers.

Methodology box alert! From "Arrested by AI: Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches"

For those teaching Treacy's Greenwich Village 1913 (RTTP) or pre-WWI US progressive movements more generally, I've reprinted 70+ primary documents: 23-fifth-avenue.pubpub.org

New honor court case reminded me of my favorite resolution: Student fraudulently accessed exam while stuck in a basement during frat hell week. Punishment prohibited membership in any campus group, except his frat, because they were his support network for dealing with the stress of honor court.

Want to add a few questions to the General Social Survey? The 2026 module competition is open now! gss.norc.org/content/dam/...

Our winter special issue is online! "Weaving the Transnational Anti-Gender Networks" guest edited by Manuela Caiani and @tranfi.bsky.social meridian.allenpress.com/mobilization...

We've started converting official precinct election results from New Jersey, and wanted to give you a look at how we handle certain files. For example, Gloucester County's results are in a 500-page PDF. Some of our usual solutions, like Tabula, don't really work here. What does? Plain text. 1/X

"Unless there is a bunch of Asians involved?" Great @theassemblync.bsky.social article on UNC trustees texting our admissions officers about specific applicants. www.theassemblync.com/education/hi...

"Boys who report feeling seen as “very feminine” are 3.5 times more likely to be bullied than their “very masculine” peers. By contrast, girls’ rates are roughly constant across the gender expression spectrum." Truly fascinating study by @joeljm.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I’m on the ASA CBSM Section’s @asa-cbsm.bsky.social Student Paper Award Committee this year. PhD students and 2024+ graduates can submit published or unpublished papers. We welcome exciting new works on collective action and social movements. Submissions are due by March 1, 2025.

history has forgotten Poll Revere, the poor revolutionary survey programmer who stuck in the fateful note to rotate response option 1 "by land" and response option 2 "by sea"

We have a preprint! With fantastic co-authors Nga Than, Leanne Fan, @tinalaw.bsky.social, and Leslie McCall, we examined whether the natural language interface of genLLMs might mimic traditional qualitative coding methods and how this compares to other methods. Key findings 👇 osf.io/preprints/so...

Played around with OCRing old texts using Google's new Gemini 2.0 Flash LLM. Very accurate on my 1K word sample pages, but it has as a quick trigger to call public domain works copyrighted and refuse to work, but less frequently than Gemini-1.5 Pro. colab.research.google.com/drive/1jZxoU...

Google quietly updated their ngrams viewer again this year. The books used appear to be extremely different yet again--the rate of the words "she said" are about 60% what they were in the 20th century compared to the 2019 release, and just 20% compared to 2009. But there's a catch:

New blog post: The A in AI Stands for Archives, an argument for using extractive AI to help journalists understand their institutions and communities better. thescoop.org/archives/202...

Three Harlem Renaissance classics from 1929 enter the public domain in a few weeks: * Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset * Passing by Nella Larsen * Banjo by Claude McKay

Hello new followers! I waste a lot of time on here, but when I'm not doing that I sometimes write books. My new one is called Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists (out in January, orderable now), and it has all you need to prevent ... oh no cup.columbia.edu/book/citizen...

This is the first I've seen betting lines for regular season NCAAW games on ESPN.

Playing around with llama3.2-vision to look at media protest photos. There are some random images, but the model still goes hard: "Overall, the image effectively conveys the idea that WOWT-TV will be broadcasting live news coverage at 10:00 PM."

Microft's 2FA texts look sketchy AF.

I'm going to try to post more about papers I read. This morning I read "Stoking the Flames: Understanding Escalation in an Online Harassment Community" dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/.... In the paper, @kejsitake.bsky.social and co-authors look at the harassment community Kiwi Farms.

Class activity/academic procrastination: Find other references to colors and gender in the HathiTrust archive. Here's the oldest "pink for boys" (1890).

A delightful surprise to see a Southern Environmental Law Center ad while watching Texas A&M vs Auburn on ESPN.

Finally!

I spent the last few days trying to better understand an ML model used to cluster text. I wrote up my understanding of it while applying it to open ended survey responses. Hopefully others find it helpful. kevinreuning.com/presentation...