(How) do sociologists use GenAI for their research? Find out in our new preprint. Written with @ajalvero.bsky.social @dustinstoltz.com and Marshall Taylor. Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey!

We are hiring! The Department of Network and Data Science of Central European University (Vienna) has an open position for an Assistant Professor in network science and computational social science.

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

For us, this journey toward explaining *surprising macro outcomes* took many years. Grateful to my amazing co-authors, @martinarvidsson.bsky.social and Peter Hedström, and to all the reviewers who supported us along the way 🚀Out now: sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

@ckreudersonnen.bsky.social and I are happy to announce two open research positions in our joint DFG-funded project VARICRIS (👉 bit.ly/varicris). We are recruiting a #PostDoc and a #PhD candidate 🧵: #PoliSky #PoliSkyJobs #polsci 🌐

🇫🇷 We are hiring 🇫🇷 Assistant or Associate Professor Position in Computational Sociology @crestsociology.bsky.social @ipparis.bsky.social Details here (please RT) www.shorturl.at/E57le

There is one week left to apply to join us at Rutgers! We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Sociology as part of a cluster of new hires in data science and AI. Applications are due next Wednesday, 10/15.

Come work with us @crestsociology.bsky.social We are looking for a post-doc with a background in social sciences, interested in NLP and in media & journalism studies. Details here: www.css.cnrs.fr/post-doctora...

Do streaming platforms trap us in cultural filter bubbles? We like to think so but the evidence says otherwise. In a new paper @abelaussant.bsky.social and I find the use of streaming platform to be associated with an increase in consumption diversity. sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

👉 Stories about economic change are never neutral. They make politics. In my new article in Sociological Theory @sociologicaltheory.bsky.social, I show how narratives about economic disruption become a source of legitimacy: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A nice discovery today: #ic2s2 keynotes are on Youtube! In particular, I think the papers listed by @lauraknelson.bsky.social in her keynote could form a great list for a CSS reading group. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXYg...

Now out in Social Networks Network analysis aspires to be “anticategorical,” yet its basic units—relationships—are usually readily categorized ('friendship,' 'love'). Thus, a nontrivial cultural typification is asserted in the very building blocks of most network analyses. doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

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:

My paper on the emergence and structure of the first American party system of the 1790s just came out in the American Sociological Review. doi.org/10.1177/0003...

Want to access the slides and the notebook for this session on LLM for Content Analysis in the Social Sciences? Here they are! www.css.cnrs.fr/llm-power-to.... Information about Text classification; Information Extraction, Text Clustering with encoders and decoder models.

🤔 The #EU 🇪🇺 aspires to be a global actor 🌍 — but do other states recognize it as such? My new study in @intlinteractions.bsky.social develops targeted #NLP / #TextAsData tools to analyze 50 years of foreign policy discourse in the annual #UN General Debate (1970–2020). A thread (1/n)

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky rdcu.be/etk07 The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Recruiting one full time or several part time RA at @crestsociology.bsky.social in Paris (well, almost in Paris) for next year to work on the evaluation of cultural items crest.science/wp-content/u...

New NEH-supported tutorial on running LLMs locally with ollama! Your laptop is more powerful than you think. Save money, privacy, and energy. aiforhumanists.com/tutorials/

Had a blast working on this paper with Christina Pao, @chrisajulian.bsky.social, @drcompton.bsky.social, and Lawrence Stacey, in which we combed through the HPS to identify demographic differences between groups based on gender identity question responses. sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science 📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden ⏰Deadline June 3 🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854 Please apply // help us spread the word

Do you field online surveys and experiments? Ever get back text responses that look unusually diplomatic and polished? In this paper, now out at Sociological Methods & Research, we study the emerging use of AI among online study participants.

New paper out in Social Science History about elite networks in the American administrative state doi.org/10.1017/ssh....

Now out in Sociological Methods & Research We argue that one of the most important use cases of generative LLMs for social scientists is transforming unstructured content into structured data. Our article shows how to do that — and what can go wrong.

Can we use language models to accurately represent the past? I still don't know. But we started to test this question in the paper below.

This is a fantastic oral history of the last 10 years of NLP and AI. www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

Our article on using LLMs for text classification is out now in SMR! 🤖🧑‍💻💬 We compare different learning regimes, from zero-shot to instruction-tuning, and share recommendations for sociologists and other social scientists interested in using these models. doi.org/10.1177/0049...

🚨New Publication @thejop.bsky.social We study who sets the issue agenda of state policymakers in the US. We find a mixed picture: they respond to shifts in attention by members of Congress, but also to the constituents in their states, particularly their own party supporters.

New paper out in @thejop.bsky.social with my colleagues at @csmapnyu.org . Substantive findings are summarized in the thread below. Of interest to a broader sociological audience: we show how to measure discursive influence between different groups.

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Come join our team studying the impact of digital media on democracy! We're hiring a Technical Lead - Research Engineering to help us build and maintain the robust data infrastructure and custom tools that power our research. More info + apply: apply.interfolio.com/165833

The lead article, by the wonderful Ioana Sendroiu and coauthors, in the new issue of ASR is on climate change! The discipline is beginning to catch up to reality. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Happy to share my new paper with Cat Dang Ton and @eollion.bsky.social on how to use generative LLMs for extracting information from textual data (conditionally accepted at Sociological Methods & Research) Here's a rundown.. osf.io/preprints/so...

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Among these is one working with me -- if you have a background in literary/cultural theory and are interested in the ways in which computational methods, including LLMs, are able to provide support for empirical sensemaking about literature, media and culture, please get in touch!

New paper from the computational culture lab, forthcoming @amjsoc.bsky.social! Building on (largely untested) sociological intuitions, we show how positions in the organizational network relate to identification with the organization, using a language model: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

🚨 ACCEPTED AT SMR 🚨
Confused by colleagues who seem to want to study LLMs instead of humans? Frustrated by skeptics (e.g., myself 8 months ago) who dismiss LLMs as a potential source of data on human behavior? Check out our paper for a new way forward: osf.io/j3bnt_v3/

🎺Join us in May 2025 for our conference on "Measuring Culture with Computational Methods" at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences @hadw-bw.bsky.social Including two amazing keynotes by @nehagondal.bsky.social and @olizardo.bsky.social Abstract (max. 750 words) to [email protected] Deadline: 01.03.25

Delighted to announce the publication of 'Handbook of Culture and Social Networks'. Grateful for the outstanding contributions from our stellar team of scholars. www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/han...

Happy New Year everyone! Jim and I just put up our January 2025 release of Speech and Language Processing! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

New pub forthcoming with Yongren Shi and Freda Lynn in Poetics (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...). In it, we conceptualize "Cultural Blau Space," the location of people in a multidimensional space simultaneously defined by many measures of personal culture.

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

New computational social science position at Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...

I created a starter pack for social network analysis, since this one was still missing. LMK if you want to be added! (I'll like the comment after adding you.) Also, check out the other starter packs for network science and complexity (so this is more social science). go.bsky.app/VDz5eWg

🎺 Open Assistant Professor position in Social Data Science at our Department (DNDS). Great research, supportive social atmosphere, willingness to communicate across disciplinary boundaries, and a beautiful city with affordable rents. For details see: careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-A...

🎬 Coming soon to a theater near you!🍿 Film is a semiotically rich medium: meaning is conveyed through the music, visuals, language, and more. A new paper from me and @dbamman.bsky.social explores what it means to computationally study performance in film. Website: naitian.org/once-more-wi... 1/n

Excited to share my paper published in ASR on unemployment and suicide!! Using big administrative data on suicide, we show that unemployed people are more likely to die by suicide, but their suicide risk is lower when and where more people are unemployed. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I'm excited to share that we've released v1.0 of our podcast corpus, SPoRC, led by my PhD student Ben Litterer! This first dataset is a slice of time, comprising over one million episodes from May and June 2020, including transcripts, diarization, and extracted audio features.

Now in APSR: What do politicians think about their voters? Fielding face-to-face surveys to 982 sitting politicians in 11 countries, and accompanying surveys of 12,000 citizens, we find that politicians have remarkably consistent - and cynical - theories of voters: /1 doi.org/10.1017/S000...