Étienne Ollion

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:

The Political Economy of AI: A Syllabus As I’ve noted occasionally before, one of the most potentially useful things that academics do is preparing syllabi, and hence organizing information about the world.

Here is a nicely curated syllabus on the political economy of AI, with rather recent papers, and a diversity of takes and angles.
www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi...

Want to access the slides and the notebook for this session on LLM for Content Analysis in the Social Sciences? Here they are! www.css.cnrs.fr/llm-power-to....

Information about Text classification; Information Extraction, Text Clustering with encoders and decoder models.

Étienne standing in front of their title slide on "LLM Power to the People"

Great workshop today on LLMs @ic2s2.bsky.social. My main update: There are more NLP tasks where good old-fashioned LMs (e.g., BERT) still outperform "modern" decoders (e.g., GPT-4) than I realized! LLM-as-a-judge work should test these more often. TY @eollion.bsky.social @emilienschultz.bsky.social

A useful survey of recent trends in LLMs for social scientific research by @davidlazer.bsky.social and colleagues.

isi-iass.org/home/wp-cont...

Des services libres en ligne du collectif CHATONS pour décentraliser et découvrir un web à l'échelle humaine, solidaire et respectueux de votre vie privée.

Vous trouvez (à raison) que WeTransfer qui se met à utiliser vos fichiers pour alimenter des IA c’est pas cool ?

RDV sur entraide.chatons.org pour une alternative : cliquez sur « Téléverser des fichiers », et vous tomberez sur un hébergement confidentiel, éthique et tranparent.

WeTransfer TOS says they can use all your uploaded content for genAI

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

Le monde des revues scientifiques au bord de l’asphyxie Plus de trois millions d’articles sont publiés chaque année dans les revues scientifiques, les chercheurs étant incités à les multiplier pour se distinguer. Une logique économique perverse s’est insta...

"Plus de 3 millions d’articles sont publiés chaque année dans les revues scientifiques. Une logique économique perverse s’est installée, qui profite d’abord aux grands éditeurs et encourage les fraudes les plus inattendues".

Sur la crise de surproduction en science:
www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...

En 2024, c'est LFI (21%), puis le RN (11%), loin devant Renaissance (1%).

@dirkhovy.bsky.social offering a few tips for interdisciplinary work at SICSS-Paris (@crestsociology.bsky.social). Fantastic talk.

Poster schedule just dropped—#IC2S2’25 program is now complete! Dive in and start planning: www.ic2s2-2025.org/program/

Alliance Catalyst Seminar on LLMs in social sciences about to start, feat. @emmabonutti.bsky.social, @bartbonikowski.bsky.social, @jphcoi.bsky.social, Thomas Renault.

A great way to close SICSS-Paris '25.

This is fantastic. Very excited by this development in European Political Science.

Please come and join us. Get involved. Sign up to the listserv. Etc

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky

rdcu.be/etk07

The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

AI, peer review and the human activity of science When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.

A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes.

This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .

JOB: Canada Excellence Research Chair in Computational Social Science, AI, and Democracy (Associate or Full Professor)

Primary appointment in Political Science
universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?...

Hendrik Erz PhD Student at the IAS, Linköping University (Sweden)

+++ 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

SICSS-Paris is on!
Today, over 40 scholars from all over Europe (and beyond) gathered at @crestumr.bsky.social for 2 weeks of courses and talks about digital methods and text analysis.
And in the evening, @eunjikim.bsky.social gave the first talk on influencers and political change.

Une émission remarquable, loin des prophéties grandioses qui trop souvent gouvernent ce débat.

Expert contribution Wikipédia (F/H) @ Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle Muséum national d'Histoire naturellerecrute !

Job alerte : le Museum d'Histoire naturelle recrute un/e wikipédien/ienne en résidence ! recrutement.mnhn.fr/front-jobs-d...

Recruiting one full time or several part time RA at @crestsociology.bsky.social in Paris (well, almost in Paris) for next year to work on the evaluation of cultural items crest.science/wp-content/u...

Série remarquable (comme d'habitude) et recommandée

Re-upping my advice about how to write a good title and abstract for an academic paper, appropriately called:

"How to Write a Title and Abstract"

Feel free to share this thread, which will focus on titles.

#EconSky #AcademicSky

@eollion.bsky.social - "Machine Bias: How LLMs Answer Polls"Can language models respond like humans in opinion polls?”

He investigates their reproducibility, bias, and the methodological challenges in computational sociology.

Curious about this app designed to speed up data annotation and LLM fine-tuning? In a secure, free environment?
Look here! www.css.cnrs.fr

📣 first #ActiveTigger publication - a poster - thanks to Axel Morin, intern at @crestsociology.bsky.social who presented it at a workshop in Mannheim.

cnrs.hal.science/hal-05097192

@eollion.bsky.social @emmabonutti.bsky.social @anninac.bsky.social #CSSIPP

ellmer 0.2.0 ellmer 0.2.0 lands with a swag of upgrades: Garrick Aden‑Buie joins the team, we make a couple of breaking changes, and add serious scale with `parallel_chat()` and `batch_chat()`. A new `params()` ...

Want to easily use LLMs from R? ellmer 0.2.0 provides:

• Batch & parallel processing
• A universal parameter interface
• Cost tracking
• Support for Mistral, Hugging Face, & Portkey

And much more! Read all about it at: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/05... #rstats

Socialisations féministes Quelle est l'empreinte laissée par la politisation du privé sur la vie de féministes ordinaires des années 70 et sur celle de leurs enfants ? L'enquête menée par Camille Masclet apporte des réponses p...

Le dimanche matin c’est bien aussi pour écouter La Suite dans les Idées en streaming ou en podcast sur @franceculture.fr — Socialisations féministes avec Camille Masclet et Camille Kouchner. Et en rubrique Actualité Hanane Karimi. www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

Social Science and Generative AI: Inquiries, Instruments, Consequences | médialab Sciences Po Cette conférence d'une journée examinera de manière réflexive l'IA générative en tant que dispositif sociotechnique, en discutant de ses effets sur le travail scientifique et de ses implications épist...

Comment les IA génératives répondent-elles aux sondages d’opinions ?

Lors de la conférence du 5 mai, @eollion.bsky.social, chercheur au @cnrs.fr, présentera son travail sur le « biais machine » et expliquera pourquoi les LLM ne sont pas prêts de remplacer les chercheurs pour les études d'opinion.