Research highlights the "state-of-the-art fallacy" in sociology, showing advanced NLP methods may not provide better insights than older ones. It emphasizes the need for methodological pluralism to align analysis with research questions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08199

AJ Alvero, Ruohong Dong, Klint Kanopka, David Lang: Algorithmic Tradeoffs, Applied NLP, and the State-of-the-Art Fallacy https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08199 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08199 https://arxiv.org/html/2509.08199

a thought I've been sitting on for a while is that AI researchers have conspicuously thin ideas about how language works, and have participated in violent reshapings of the world to make these ideas, and the technologies premised on them, make sense. more here: tisjune.github.io/papers/cscw_...

I am so excited to host a panel with @ajalvero.bsky.social at #4S2025! If you're around next Saturday, join us for discipline-blending sessions and conversation under the theme of "Writing Things Down: Textual Technologies and their Consequences." @4sweb.bsky.social

Swing by on November 6th! Will be on Zoom as well. Excited to share ongoing work about GenAI and sociology 😎

The world is a mess. Need a laugh? Check out @ajalvero.bsky.social and my Linguistic Affordances Framework (LAF) for the social study of language technologies! Jokes aside, we hope this will help researchers make sense of social changes associated with new technologies. doi.org/10.1177/0894...

Zhang, Xu, and Alvero show how online survey participants are already using AI for open-ended responses, demonstratng how many researchers will have to grapple with the impacts of AI-generated data journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out now. Along with my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year. Here's a thread on each of the ten papers:

More than 40% of sociologists use Gen AI on a weekly basis; @ajalvero.bsky.social presents at the #SociologicalScience conference. #sociology #metascience 🧪

Attn: the special issue of SMR on Generative AI in Sociology is now online. The whole issue is fire, but the introduction by @thomasdavidson.bsky.social and Danny Karell is a must read, covering prompting, measurement, and simulations. It's a road map for soc sci research in the genAI era. +

Thrilled to share "Parametrizing 'the digital': Education research methods for platform ecologies" — new from me, Robert LeBlanc, and @alliethrall.bsky.social in @lmt-journal.bsky.social. Paywalled now, but will be OA soon (reach out for a PDF in the meantime) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

x.com/simonezhang/... 😎

Sharing a new paper about using machine learning to scrutinize parole hearings in California: btlj.org/wp-content/u...

Sharing a thought provoking piece by @tiffjhuang.bsky.social about Ohio's anti-DEI. Reminds me of the problems I escaped from in Florida! www.dispatch.com/story/opinio...

I'll be presenting work at the Pacific Sociological Association Conference in San Francisco next Friday in a session titled "New Digital Methods", slide through! (work done with anthony lising antonio, Leslie Luqueño, and Francis A. Pearman; preprint here: osf.io/preprints/so...) #PSA2025

Did anyone archive the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)? #socsky #econsky

Still a few days left to submit!

Hey everyone, wanted to share a call for abstracts for a panel I’m cohosting with Haley Lepp at the 2025 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference: docs.google.com/document/d/1... If you’re working on text as data/computational linguistics/LLMs and have an idea, share it!!

Do you need educational and psychological item response data to do your research? The IRW has 600 item response datasets (more coming!), distributed in a standardized format and ready for analysis.

Cross posting: We are still receiving applications for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at the UF partner site! sicss.io/2024/florida/ A local theme is social media data and text analysis. Apply by May 30. Free 2-week workshop at the University of Florida

Cross posting: We are still receiving applications for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at the UF partner site! sicss.io/2024/florida/ A local theme is social media data and text analysis. Apply by May 30. Free 2-week workshop at the University of Florida

Sharing a preprint co-written with great colleagues (Alejandra Regla-Vargas Jinsook Lee, Rene Kizilcec, anthony antonio, and Thorsten Joachims) about the relationship between variation in human writing style features, AI generated text, and sociodemographics osf.io/preprints/so...

Wrote about AI sentience along with my good friend and colleague Courtney Pena. TLDR: we don't think modern AI is sentient nor could ever be sentient; we make this argument from sociocultural/quotidian perspectives; this doesn't mean AI isn't useful ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/103...

GOOD LUCK MATTHEW

Alright, youre new here, so lemme tell you how it works. On this site, we are all Blue Mages. We can only use magic stolen from other users. We win arguments by posting lists of our health problems. And we Never. Quote tweet. Doulas

My first post is a picture I took of my dog, Samson, while living in Monterey during the tail end of my PhD. Good times!