Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co
05.03.2026 22:54
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Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co
The Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association is hosting a pre-conference here at City College (in our FiDi division)!
Our call for abstracts is open until April 1, 2026.
asaskat.com/skattoday/
Now out in the American Sociological Review
We present the first large-scale assessment of the structure and evolution of temporalities expressed in U.S. climate change news coverage (2000 to 2021). For this, we analyzed more than 23,000 statements about climate change effects and actions. 🧵 1/
🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...
🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?
We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...
NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.
If Odo converted to Judaism he would have to be liquid on Shabbat
Well this story blew up. Went to the front page of reddit, hacker news, Gizmodo. People donated thousands of dollars to the legal fund of Jeff Sovern, who dismantled 13 Flock surveillance cameras. The response was near-universal enthusiasm for the project of smashing invasive, exploitative tech.
Oh amassing large enough datasets with provenance for language model training is totally doable. Just when you do that you feel lonely (and unpaid) as people don’t really care.
LLM cloud inference dominates usage, but should it? Local models and accelerators have improved massively over recent years.
Perfect routing to best local model "reduce energy consumption by 80.4%, compute by 77.3%, and cost by 73.8% versus cloud-only deployment"
arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07885
Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.
Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:
Currently, there are thousands of large pretrained language models (LLMs) available to social scientists. How do we select among them? Using validity, reliability, reproducibility, and replicability as guides, we explore the significance of:(1) model openness, (2) model footprint, (3) training data, and (4) model architectures and fine-tuning. While ex ante tests of validity (i.e., benchmarks) are often privileged in these discussions, we argue that social scientists cannot altogether avoid validating computational measures (ex-post). Replicability, in particular, is a more pressing guide for selecting language models. Being able to reliably replicate a particular finding that entails the use of a language model necessitates reliably reproducing a task. To this end, we propose starting with smaller, open models, and constructing delimited benchmarks to demonstrate the validity of the entire computational pipeline.
Here's a little working paper with Marshall Taylor and Sanuj Kumar:
Selecting Language Models for Social Science
arxiv.org/abs/2601.10926
Thoughts welcome!
📢 In this Social Forces article, I introduce occupational elitism as a novel measure of social closure: the share of upper-class background workers within an occupation.
Its consequences for earnings stratification can be examined using a social closure theory lens.
🔓 doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...
Why does a worse candidate win? Or an inferior song dominate?
New article with @alexgelas.bsky.social, @pantelispa.bsky.social & Gaël Le Mens.
We show that often once A becomes even slightly more popular than B, people choose A much more often.
www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
I’m looking for three PhD students for my new ERC project, starting 1 September. The goal is to understand how firms shape inequality in workers’ careers—using population registers.
Please spread the word! Deadline is March 8, more info here (see projects 4-6):
ics-graduateschool.nl/vacancies/
Andrej Karpathy is at It again
microgpt share.google/WZbks45IS2DV...
Currently, there are thousands of large pretrained language models (LLMs) available to social scientists. How do we select among them? Using validity, reliability, reproducibility, and replicability as guides, we explore the significance of:(1) model openness, (2) model footprint, (3) training data, and (4) model architectures and fine-tuning. While ex ante tests of validity (i.e., benchmarks) are often privileged in these discussions, we argue that social scientists cannot altogether avoid validating computational measures (ex-post). Replicability, in particular, is a more pressing guide for selecting language models. Being able to reliably replicate a particular finding that entails the use of a language model necessitates reliably reproducing a task. To this end, we propose starting with smaller, open models, and constructing delimited benchmarks to demonstrate the validity of the entire computational pipeline.
Here's a little working paper with Marshall Taylor and Sanuj Kumar:
Selecting Language Models for Social Science
arxiv.org/abs/2601.10926
Thoughts welcome!
📢WORK! At the Sociology department of @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social we are hiring a postdoc who will work on applications of AI in sociological research. Join our vibrant-yet-cohesive research community doing cutting-edge research. Please share or apply! www.uu.nl/en/organisat...
Follow up from the matplotlib maintainer who got hitbotted theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...
About 10 years ago, I set out to better understand the drivers of radicalization and deradicalization into white supremacy. Work from our endeavors is starting to come out, and I am no longer concerned about sharing it.
I want to share the findings from one of these studies, published last March. 🧵
✨ We’re excited to announce the Spring 2026 IAS Seminar Series, featuring a stellar lineup of speakers and thought-provoking talks. Open to all! #AcademicSky
I took the Colbert Questionert!
Watch the full interview here: youtu.be/HPONVyNiWsU?...
La course des nouveaux usages associés aux modèles génératifs met la professions scientifiques à rude épreuve.
Article précieux pour suivre l'état des usages #GenAI en sociologie sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13... par @oms279.bsky.social, @ajalvero.bsky.social @dustinstoltz.com et M. Taylor
This paper outlines a distributional approach to institutional analysis, reconceptualising institutions as distributions of knowledge and activity across people. We argue that institutionalisation and institutional change are best understood by focussing on actors with the requisite knowledge and motivation to keep institutional patterns going, fix them when they go awry, or transform them when required, here called functionaries. The distributional approach allows us to distinguish between two main types of institutional change often conflated in the literature: Content-based and formal change. Content-based change, the one most often discussed, involves the importation, recombination, or expansion of specific patterns of activity. In contrast, formal change, often neglected in the literature, refers to shifts in the distribution of knowledge and activity, leading to dynamics of centralisation and decentralisation of institutional patterns. In this way, the distributional approach highlights the role of functionaries in both institutional stability and change, providing a micro-level perspective on institutional dynamics.
New paper out with Marshall Taylor and @olizardo.bsky.social:
Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis
Instead of institutions as things that contain people, we suggest institutions as expertise distributed across people.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
We are looking for a doctoral researcher to work with us on a supercool project in collaboration with linguists. The deadline is Feb 15th, contact me if you have any questions!
stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/9...
Now out in Sociological Science
(How) do sociologists use GenAI for their research? Find out in our paper.
Written with @ajalvero.bsky.social @dustinstoltz.com and Marshall Taylor. Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey!!
Markets and Mobility: How Employers Structure Economic Opportunity
Intergenerational mobility, measuring the ability to achieve economic success regardless of family background, is a critical reflection of a society’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Rising income inequality has raised concerns about the potential erosion of upward mobility. While education has traditionally been viewed as the path to mobility, its transformative power is facing challenges in a rapidly evolving job market. This project reorients the focus of intergenerational mobility research by highlighting the labor market as an arena for the reproduction of advantage. It employs a comparative approach, using administrative data from four countries: Sweden, Austria, England, and the United States. It also incorporates evidence from a broader set of nations through cross-national surveys, longitudinal household surveys, labor force surveys, secondary data, and digital trace data. The project employs cutting-edge empirical methods, including quasi- experimental designs, event studies, within-family comparisons, decomposition analyses, counterfactual simulations, and diagnostic checks to rigorously assess the extent of inequalities in the labor market. The research investigates how family background influences the sorting of individuals to employers and workplaces, accounting for education and occupation, and explores variations in career progression within and between employers. It comprehensively catalogues and assesses mechanisms shaping workplace inequality, contributing to the development of social closure theory. Additionally, the project evaluates intervention strategies, encompassing both employer practices and government actions, to promote fair opportunity in the labor market.
JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project.
Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months.
Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.
Thanks, Rick!
wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage
1/ A shout out to seriously the most stunning article I have read perhaps ever - Erin Maglaque's in the December @Journalofmoder. I was one of the readers for this piece, and I even wrote in my report that it was such an intense read that I had to go for a walk afterwards to calm down.
happy anniversary of christopher columbus mistaking manatees for mermaids and complaining about how mid they were
