Thomas Davidson

This is pretty much what the earlier work on debiasing word embeddings was doing. And it turns out that it doesn't work...

Cue one of the best CS paper titles aclanthology.org/N19-1061/

Contributors include: @sxz.bsky.social @ajalvero.bsky.social @eollion.bsky.social @lpargyle.bsky.social @davidbroska.bsky.social @austin-van-loon.bsky.social @bstewart.bsky.social @hwaight.bsky.social @solmg.bsky.social @tinalaw.bsky.social @lauraknelson.bsky.social @oms279.bsky.social

Thanks for reading this thread. The entire special issue can be found here: journals.sagepub.com/toc/smra/54/3

If you want to talk more about AI and sociology, I'll be at ASA and will be giving a talk on some ongoing AI research in the Saturday morning session on Culture and CSS

Of course, the methodological focus means that we don’t cover other important topics like impacts of AI on society and the politics of AI. There is a lot more work to be done.

See the recent Socius special issue for more perspectives on the sociology of AI journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...

If you want to learn more about these articles, check out our editors’ introduction, where we provide an overview and discuss some central themes.

One point we emphasize is how the model ecosystem has matured & open-weight models are viable for many problems journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Stuhler, Ton, and Ollion show how LLMs enable more complex information extraction tasks that can be applied to text corpora, with an application to the study of obituaries journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

A study by Than et al. revisits an earlier SMR paper, exploring how LLMs can be used for qualitative coding tasks, providing detailed guidance on how to approach the problem journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Law and Roberto showcase how vision language models like GPT-4o can extract information from satellite images, applying these techniques to study segregation in the built environment journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Waight and colleagues develop a pipeline for quantifying narrative similarity, combining the latest frontier LLMs with earlier techniques to study Russian influence campaigns journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Maranca and colleagues show the importance of statistical corrections when using predictions from multimodal LLMs and other computer vison models for downstream tasks, providing several applications journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Kozlowski and Evans synthesize work using generative AI for simulation, giving us an in-depth view into how AI models work and how scholars are addressing six challenging issues journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Broska, Howes, and van Loon propose the mixed-subjects approach, providing a methodology for combining estimates from human subjects and silicon samples journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Lyman and colleagues explore the trade-offs between using instruction-tuned models and base versions of LLMs for downstream tasks, emphasizing the need to better understand model training journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Boelaert and colleagues pose a challenge to work that uses LLMs as substitutes for humans in surveys, finding that AI models exhibit idiosyncratic biases they term “machine bias” journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

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...

A screenshot of the Sociological Methods & Research website showing the special issue title

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:

Federal place-based policy and the geography of inequality in the United States, 1990–2019 Abstract. This paper assesses the growth and spatial distribution of federal place-based policies in the United States. Using a novel dataset of federal pl

📣 Hot off the press 📣
We document tremendous growth in U.S. federal place-based funding, show it has disproportionately gone to areas with more nonprofits & stronger housing markets, and find a pattern of cumulative advantage in funding among high-poverty neighborhoods.

doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...

How do different people — and AI models — perceive hate speech? What are the implications of this heterogeneity in content moderation on social media? We're excited learn from @thomasdavidson.bsky.social of Rutgers University at SICSS-Penn today!

“They got their program, and I got mine”: A cautionary tale concerning the ethical implications of using respondent-driven sampling to study injection drug users This article examines the ethical implications of using respondent-driven sampling (RDS) to conduct HIV behaviour surveillance among injection drug us…

Not incarceration, but I took Doug Heckathorn's respondent-driven sampling class and recall similar debates about payments to injection drug users, including these types of IRB concerns

See this critique www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... and the reply www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence into Social Science Research: Measurement, Prompting, and Simulation - Thomas Davidson, Daniel Karell, 2025 Generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers new capabilities for analyzing data, creating synthetic media, and simulating realistic social interactions. This...

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. +

Abstract for "Generative Multimodal Models for Social Science: An Application with Satellite and Streetscape Imagery" by Tina Law and Elizabeth Roberto

New article w/ @emroberto.bsky.social out in SMR! We introduce a framework for analyzing images 🖼️ with generative multimodal models and provide an empirical application using satellite and street images. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages - Hannah Waight, Solomon Messing, Anton Shirikov, Margaret E. Roberts, Jonathan Nagler, Jason Greenfield, Megan A. Brown, Kevin Aslett, Joshua A. Tuck... How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups sh...

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/...

Glad it worked for you. I had verified but still got nothing. I tried a month ago or so perhaps it has just been implemented.

The documentation indicates that summaries of the reasoning are available, but nothing was output when I tried to follow these instructions platform.openai.com/docs/guides/...

I tried this recently. It appears that there is an argument for this but they do not provide the actual traces. The best you can get is the number of reasoning tokens consumed. These are always in blocks of 64.

I am looking for a research assistant/pre-doc!

jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/249...

Please consider applying and reach out to me (DM/email) if you have any questions. Deadline: June 20

*Only for current US residents with a valid visa. Rutgers does not sponsor a visa for this position*

I'm sorry, I don't want to be a party pooper, but I'm 99% sure the orange flowers are lillies. The whole genus is toxic.

Lovely Lilies and Curious Cats: A Dangerous Combination Lilies in the “true lily” and “daylily” families are very dangerous for cats.

www.fda.gov/animal-veter...

FYI lillies are deadly for cats, eating a small amount or licking pollen can kill. I’d keep them out of reach.

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.