Neal Caren

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford | The Segregation Tracking Project Use our visualizations to explore educational opportunity in your school & community.

VERSION 2.0 of the Segregation Tracking Project is here!

New data on racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and schools over the last 30+ years for every school district, metro area, state, county, congressional district (new!), and more!

edopportunity.org/segregation/

Structuring articulation: asylum applications and elite political communication on social media during the European refugee crisis How do political parties adapt their discourse when confronted with rapidly changing structural conditions? This study examines the relationship between asylum applications and elite political comm...

New paper examines the relationship between online political discourse and structural conditions.

European parties responded to national asylum numbers by increasing online attention, but content differed. Left-wing parties posted more in solidarity and right-wing parties shared more about crime.

Graduate Programs: School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University Sociology PhD program stands out for its interdisciplinary nature, a focus on both academic and non-academic careers, and publicly engaged scholarship.

We are excited to announce that after 20 years, Tulane University once again offers a Sociology doctoral degree. We have spent some time developing an innovative program in public-facing sociology, that will train Ph.Ds to be relevant beyond the academy 1/
liberalarts.tulane.edu/sociology/ac...

We’re hiring! The UNC-CH Sociology Department is looking for a Teaching Assistant or Associate Professor (3–3 load) to join our faculty. Great students, great department. Application review begins 2/16.

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/312...

Black-and-white newspaper photo of a young man working as a busboy. Caption: One night he was just one of the bus boys scurrying here and there with empty dishes, ice, water bottles and more butter—and the next day he was Langston Hughes, prize winner of a poetry competition conducted by “Opportunity” magazine. Here’s a photo of Langston Hughes, bus boy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington whose poem, “Weary Blues,” won the poetry prize, and whose other verse has won the admiration of Vachel Lindsay and other outstanding American writers.

One hundred years ago today in the Baltimore Afro-American:

"Here’s a photo of Langston Hughes, bus boy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington whose poem, 'Weary Blues,' won the poetry prize"

YouTube video by Cineverse Beat The Rich / The Sodomobile

His The Awful Truth “Beat the Rich” youtu.be/akEI9ZwtKcM?...

Measuring Scalar Constructs in Social Science with LLMs Many constructs that characterize language, like its complexity or emotionality, have a naturally continuous semantic structure; a public speech is not just "simple" or "complex," but exists on a cont...

Is it this one? arxiv.org/abs/2509.03116? You might have the wrong paper link.

#NoKings in Carrboro NC

Carolina Sociology is hiring!

• Tenure-track in computational sociology or advanced quantitative methods
• Open rank in population health.

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

I've tried Tesseract and EasyOCR, and neither performs well on this corpus. Abbyy Finereader probably does better than those, but I need to restart my license.

Preliminary checks on Tesseract+LLM for cleaning are very hopeful for printed works.

Your LLM structured data stuff was 100% the impetutus from turning this into a more systemicatic process.

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.

Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups

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...

🤗 Datasets?

What We Learned Studying the #NoKings Day Across the US One of the challenges of studying protest in this era of distributed activism is that it’s extremely difficult to get a decent sample of who is participating across sites. When my team survey…

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

After Delay, Chapel Hill Board Votes to Award Tenure After faculty raised alarm over the board’s delay on the decisions, trustees finally debated and voted by email. A couple of them said they generally opposed tenure.

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...

UNC-CH faculty concerned over 'highly unusual' lack of tenure promotions UNC-Chapel Hill faculty are raising concerns about a lack of professors receiving tenure this year, especially in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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...

At Chapel Hill, Only Health-Sciences Professors Have Been Getting Tenure The UNC Chapel Hill board hasn’t tenured a single professor in fields outside the health sciences since January. The inaction has prompted confusion and alarm among faculty.

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

This is awesome!

Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism? Before researchers can use language models to simulate the past, they need to understand the risk of anachronism. We find that prompting a contemporary model with examples of period prose does not pro...

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. +