Laura K. Nelson

I'm curious what jobs, or forms of writing, you're thinking of here?

Ah! It's nothing to do with prompting. ML, the method, the math, is feminist because it allows for high dimensionality in the way it represents and processes data - people, language, images. Rather than reduce people/text/etc to a category (e.g. surveys), ML uses ✨vectors✨ with all their dimensions

Umm, there were never prizes for washing dishes tho, even when done by hand? A better analogy is photography. Most pictures are artistically bad but serve a purpose. Everyone can take a (bad) picture, no skill at all involved. Just click. There is still a demand, and prizes, for skilled photography.

Absolutely. Writing can be beautiful! It can give you chills, take your breath away. There will always be a place for that.

Oh yeah for sure. But even those who most love the art of language ought to be able to accept that writing means many different things to people, and serves many functions

This is the needed corrective to the new round of "when humans write it's like music, every word carefully chosen and precisely placed" which is simply not the reality for most people and situations. Much of writing is a tedious task that we have to slog through to simply keep our job/day/etc going.

Mimeograph, Linux, Napster

Higher ed programs should teach more about history/philosophy/sociology of science

The history of AI in China vs the US is so interesting. Or even East Asia vs North America. And it goes way back! I figured someone would have published on this by now.

Is there a good piece to assign on this? Preferably with some historical context? I start my class with the Xiaoice/Tey example and would love to follow it up with something contemporary.

Assistant Teaching Professor in Computational Social Science and Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

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/

Oh this is a fantastic paper.

I wonder if we can leverage the overly simplified way LLMs simulate opinions to do controlled experiments of some sort. Can we turn this into a positive, counterfactual-type feature of LLM simulations?

Incredible. Fantastic research design.

🧵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...

The IC2S2 deadline is right around the corner!

We really need more reviewers to make this conference work. I know (I KNOW) you all get a lot of requests but please consider signing up, especially if you submit. It’s just a few abstracts, we’ll keep the review load light. Promise!

So awesome to see this international bestseller data *out in the world*! That's the goal!

Thanks to @jamesfolta.com, @literaryhub.bsky.social, and F. Poretti for these great pieces.

From time to time I mutter about a secret project that involves benchmarks and historical language models. Here's a formal announcement of the Schmidt Sciences grant. Other PIs include @dmimno.bsky.social , @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @andrewpiper.bsky.social, and @mattwilkens.bsky.social. And +

For a long time education has been turning into a "fill in the blank" activity. Ace the test, write the paper according to my prof's rubric, impress the right people, and you'll get the grade. But of course we know that's not learning. AI is a very stark illustration of why that's not learning.

Oh no (but I get it). I'm optimistic because students are actively and deeply grappling with what it means to learn now. Like ok, I'm here in uni to get credentialed, but I also value myself as a person. It's golden opportunity for us to engage students about the process of learning itself.

I have to say, even with the Einstein thing (in fact partially because of it), as an educator I am still fully optimistic about the future of education, more than I've been.

I would absolutely not want to be on a university cyber security team though right now. Nightmare scenario for them.

5 authors by whom I've read at least 5 books:
Bourdieu
Marx
Jo Nesbo
Peggy Parish
C.S. Lewis

Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Archives | American Sociological Association The Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Section is the first Section in the 115 years of the American Sociological Association that provides an official space for scholarship on Indigen...

Still workong on ASA submissions? Check out the section on Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations (@ipnn-asa.bsky.social) and the call for submissions. Panels will highlight the brilliance of Indigenous and allied sociology in the discpline. Please submit!

www.asanet.org/asa_sections...

(Before this debate made it to that journal it played on out social media, mainly on LinkedIn. Thick with acrimony, as tends to happen on social media)

Why We Should Reject to Reject the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Qualitative Analysis: A Response to Jowsey, Braun, Clarke, Lupton, and Fine (2025) - Stefano De Paoli, 2026 This position paper argues against the categorical rejection of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) in qualitative analysis, as proposed by Jowsey et al....

One example:

Call: We Reject the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reflexive Qualitative Research
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Response: Why We Should Reject to Reject the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Qualitative Analysis
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The dam has already broke in the qualitative data analysis world and it is deeply acrimonious

A lesson about networks that I’m kind of proud of: at the beginning of the year, I gave my 200 students a dumb survey: fav books, foods, etc. I told them they could use pseudonyms and that I’d share their responses with the class. We’ve been using that data in various ways: to make points about +

Come join @nathannunn.bsky.social James Fenske, Stephan Heblich and myself in the far north of 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, boasts up to 240 nights of active aurora borealis per year ❤️

#sociology peeps: I am organizing a section at ASA called neuroscience, cognition, and sociology. Please submit. Please pass around. Papers need not do both neuroscience and cognition...

This is neat