Can AI-generated images work as visual vignettes in survey experiments? I argue yes - and discuss how . in my new @sscratsage.bsky.social paper: doi.org/10.1177/0894...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Happy 13th birthday, Wikidata! Facts do not live in isolation; they form a web of connections that shape understanding. Thirteen years ago, Wikidata was created to store and link facts across Wikipedia and its sister projects. ➡️ w.wiki/Jg

Dinge, die gleichzeitig passiert sind: - Elon Musk startet "Grokipedia", eine "propagandafreie" Wikipedia-Kopie - komplett von einer KI geschrieben - Eine Studie sagt, 45% aller KI-Ergebnisse seien "falsch" Das und mehr – heute bei "Haken dran" mit @kattascha.bsky.social (zum ersten Mal bei uns!):

Ever wondered how to get better survey feedback from respondents? 🧐 👉 Check out our new @jssam.bsky.social paper together with @jkhoehne.bsky.social @jessicakuhlm.bsky.social testing different (1) visual designs and (2) answer formats of #FinalCommentQuestions. 🌐 academic.oup.com/jssam/advanc...

Happy 24th Birthday Wayback Machine! On October 24, 2001, The Internet Archive organization launched a free digital archive of websites for the general public called the Wayback Machine. The oldest pages stored in the archive date back to 1996.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"

Learned that an anonymous outside expert on submersibles did an interview with the OceanGate Titan investigation, and they released a transcript, with all the names redacted. The first line of his first answer? "I'm sure you're familiar with my film Titanic."

📢 CREST & ENSAE Paris (IP Paris) are hiring an Assistant/Associate Professor in Computational Sociology starting Sept 2026! crest.science/wp-content/u... 🧠 Quantitative & computational focus 🌍 Open to all 📅 Apply by Jan 31 2026 → [email protected] #AcademicJobs #Sociology #HiPARIS #CREST

📢 Join the SweCSS Community! If you would like to stay informed about upcoming events, job opportunities, and news from The Swedish Excellence Centre for Computational Social Science (SweCSS), you are welcome to join our mailing list. #css #academicsky 👉 Sign up here: liu.se/en/research/...

📣 Attention, postdoctoral researchers! ❗ Apply now for our MZES Visiting Fellowships 😊 💡 Spend 2-4 weeks at the MZES to share ideas 💰 Funding for accommodation, travel, daily allowance 📆 Deadline: 28 November Full information: 👉 www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/en/news/deta...

Monty Hall reminder: the only good reason to want the car is to sell it for more goats.

🚨 New working paper alert 🚨 Missing summer — and the Tour de France? Don’t worry, we got you covered. 🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️ In this paper, we show that being on the route of Tour de France reduces far-right voting. osf.io/preprints/so...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗ 📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/... Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

ICYMI: If you’re working or are planning on working with Google Trends Data for research, make sure to read this article by @floriankeusch.bsky.social & co-authors. They explore common pitfalls, incl. construct validity and reliability, and show how to improve data quality to enhance robustness.

Thanks for the recognition! 🥳 My USP: delivering reviews before the reminders.

Reviewing, and doing it well, is one of the best services one can do to our profession. Massive thanks to the winners of the #ecsr2025 Best Reviewer Award: @saidhassan.bsky.social, @katyaoivanova.bsky.social, Nicole Schwitter

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you. Apply by: 10 Oct www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

@bramlancee.bsky.social and I are organising the 3rd AMCIS Workshop on "Survey Experiments in the Social Sciences", 1-2 October 2025 in Amsterdam. We are looking for Papers and/or Research Designs. Please email your submission to me and Bram, submission deadline is 27/08/2025. @aissr.bsky.social

🔈Job Alert! IAS is looking for a postdoctoral researcher as part of the Swedish Excellence Center in Computational Social Science -SWECSS. ⌛Deadline: September 30th Apply 👉 liu.se/en/work-at-l... #academicsky #css

🤖💡 Are LLMs really developing social behaviors—or just reproducing familiar patterns from training? In our new paper, @pettertornberg.com and I take a closer look at recent claims of emergent conventions in AI and offer a different perspective... 🧵

When they tell you academia is a woke bubble just remember where we came from

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere. But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

🚀 New postdoc position for Platform Data & Computational Social Science Join us to drive @gesis.org' efforts around the Digital Services Act (DSA) and conduct research with online platform data 💼 TV-L EG 14 | Location: Cologne 📌 Apply now: www.gesis.org/en/institute... #DSA #CSS #DataScience

🎥 All keynote talks from IC²S² ‘25 are now available on our YouTube channel! #ic2s2 #css

Finally got this banger of a title out: 𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠, 𝑎 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑔𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑎 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠. If your descriptive figures and your model tell different stories, trust the figure. (And maybe rethink the model.) 👉 📄 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thinking about using #CSS methods to study #racism, #stereotypes or #hate speech in text? 📐 👉 Check out my first dissertation paper co-authored by @fabiennelind.bsky.social and @hajoboo.bsky.social just published in Annals of the ICA! @icahdq.bsky.social 🥳 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/annc...

Quite a strong final statement: "Descriptive research is important and it is a pity that the general obsession with causal estimates disincentivizes researchers from attempting to publish careful and detailed description."

+++ ANNOUNCEMENT +++ I'm currently on the job market, looking for Postdoc opportunities (end of 2025/early 2026). If you are — or know someone who is — in need of a political sociologist/computational social scientist, please get in touch or share my CV! More info: www.hendrik-erz.de

„KI verändert schon jetzt, wie wir denken" Ein Experiment mit jungen Forschern an der Universität Mannheim zeigt, wie tiefgreifend ChatGPT & Co das wissenschaftliche Schreiben verändern – und dass das noch längst nicht alles ist. Im Wiarda-Blog: www.jmwiarda.de/blog/2025/06...

🧠🚀 What happens when early-career social scientists use ChatGPT for academic writing? Clearer and more coherent text - but no boost to depth, originality, rigour, or literature use, according to our field experiment. 📄👇

Call for papers: Generative AI and Social Science Research journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...

Thanks for the shoutout! Our review of 69 experimental studies on disability discrimination in hiring shows: ✳️ Big gaps in callback rates ✳️ Some conditions get all the attention ✳️ We need more theory + intersectionality

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

Join us on Thursday, 15 May, at 14.30 CET for the International Roundtable on Computational Social Science with @nschwitter.bsky.social 🔹Using AI-Generated Images in Vignette Experiments 🔹More info: liu.se/en/event/202...

Anomalies & data problems are found in the Hungarian EU SILC income data from around year 2017. It is very likely that the data was manipulated to decrease the poverty rate. Annamaria Tatrai and Andras Gabos conducted a very thorough investigation of the issue: www.valaszonline.hu/2025/04/01/e...

Thrilled our global data ecosystem audit was accepted to #ICLR2025! Empirically, it shows: 1️⃣ Soaring synthetic text data: ~10M tokens (pre-2018) to 100B+ (2024). 2️⃣ YouTube is now 70%+ of speech/video data but could block third-party collection. 3️⃣ <0.2% of data from Africa/South America. 1/

Here's an update on sociology (and some demography) journal editorial polices with regard to sharing preprints before submission and after acceptance. A big improvement from the last edition of this table. With one exception.

📢 My paper w Aron Szekely on honour-based violence is published online (Open Access): journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.... We explain this puzzling phenomenon applying game-theory and testing it using large-scale data on norms and actual femicides. @sriucl.bsky.social @uclsociology.bsky.social

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024 — a rise they attribute to AI crawlers. AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege

1/ Excited to share our new preprint “A Collective Field Experiment Disentangling Participation in Online Political Discussions” – osf.io/preprints/so...

At this point, it is obvious that it is not safe for scholars to travel the US. There are no easy solutions for conferences scheduled in the US this year but it should be cleary to everyone involved that they cannot just go ahead as planned.

The #TaDa Speaker Series is back for the spring 🎉 We're looking forward to an exciting line-up of talks by @prashantgarg.bsky.social, @miriamschirmer.bsky.social, @chdausgaard.bsky.social, @taniseceron.bsky.social, @lukashetzer.bsky.social, and Catarina Pereira! More infos at tada.cool & on Slack ⬇️

🚨 Upcoming: "Digital Data, Contextual Complexities, and Lessons for Social Scientists" 👤 @nschwitter.bsky.social (University of Mannheim) 🗓️ Wed, March 5, 13:45-15:15 CET 📺 Register for the live stream: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi... 🔗 socialsciencedatalab.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/page/events/

Registration for our conference "Computational Social Science: AI and Society – Exploring Inequality in the Digital Age" now open! 🗓 May 15-16th, 2025 (University of Mannheim/MZES/MCDS) 👉 Esp. for young scholars interested in CSS and/or inequality 🔍 computational-social-science.org/workshops/20...