Étienne Ollion

Friends in Oxford, I'm giving a talk at Nuffield College Wed 18 Feb 16:00. "Life trajectories and life chances: New approaches from population registries and AI" nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

Postdoctoral researcher on applications of AI in sociological research Are you able to lead sociological research into the AI age?

📢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...

Gallup Will No Longer Track Presidential Approval Ratings

Decades of presidential approval polling will be discontinued.

A valuable historical resource comes to an end. At a low point for the existing president’s approval rating.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/u...

Got a great paper on how AI is reshaping public opinion research? Submit it to POQ's special issue on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Survey Research!

Papers are being reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis starting now – full details here: s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/clarivate-sc...

Qui est ciblé par l'hostilité en ligne dans la politique française ?

Très contente de partager enfin les résultats d'une longue enquête sur cette question dans la dernière Revue française de science politique :
shs.cairn.info/tap-t78ca45t...
🧵

On l'oublie, mais des débuts de l'aviation commerciale de masse à environ 1975, les détournements étaient nombreux. Moyen de protestation politique ("à Cuba!"), de gagner de l'argent, voire de voyager sans payer.

Koerner le raconte, comme les luttes pour (et contre) la sécurité dans les avions.

Very interesting research paper that shows that using AI with programming can significantly reduce mastery over topics. Perhaps unsurprising, but the lack of significant speed gains in this exercise are remarkable

www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Doctoral Position in Social Data Science Deadline: 15.02.2026

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...

Retranscrire avec whisper via huma-num Cela fait maintenant plusieurs mois que le bruit court : un logiciel gratuit permettrait d’obtenir des retranscriptions automatiques d’une qualité excellente. Il s’agit de “Whisper”, développé par Ope...

Whisper hébergé par huma-num, car les entretiens sont protégés. Plus d'infos ici
agepouvoir.hypotheses.org/494

Deadline: January, 31st 2026.
www.css.cnrs.fr/assistant-or...

Only six days left! Tutorial submissions close on February 2nd.

Submit here: ic2s2-2026.org/submit-tutor...

Agreed. I have never really used it for classification myself, but some do. And I have found it useful for exploring corpora, especially in the classroom.

"On meurt dans mon Université", par la présidente de l'Université Paul Valéry à Montpellier. Parce que les baisses de financement des universités ce sont aussi des conditions de travail si dégradées qu'elles en deviennent intenables

The BERTopic tutorial focuses on its underlying philosophy, as well as on the merits and limitations of this widely used tool.

Carefully written by @Axel Morin (CSS@IP-Paris) , it explain how to apply BERTopic in a social science project.
👉 css-polytechnique.github.io/css-ipp-mate...

What are the main issues discussed in a set of documents?

We’ve just released a step-by-step BERTopic tutorial.

We also launch a new page, gathering various NLP tutorials for social scientists.
👉 www.css.cnrs.fr/tutorials-an...

Why on earth would you do this? Academics don't prepone anything (meetings, deadlines, turning grades in). Weird

✨ 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

Deadline: January, 31st 2026.
www.css.cnrs.fr/assistant-or...

Sur les décisions juridictionnelles citées 18. Il y a lieu de faire remarquer au conseil de M. la nécessité de vérifier les décisions juridictionnelles citées, au demeurant non produites, avant de saisir le juge. En effet, les décisions « CE, 13 décembre 2006, n° 290348 », « CE, 9 juillet 2010, n° 339845 ». « CE. 16 février 2011., n° 337775 », << CE, 09 novembre 2015, n° 391548 »., « CE., 11 décembre ... 015, n° 394254 », << CE, 27 avril 2016., n° 389755 », « CE, 27 octobre 2016, n° 40274:L >>, « CE, 19 avril 2017., n° 396914 >> et « CE, 11 juillet 2018., n° 420287 », les décisions « CNDA􀃋 15 mars 2019, n° 18017738 », « CNDA, 20 décembre 2018, n° 18003283 >>et« CNDA, 21 octobre ... 015, n° 14017039, et les arrèts « CAA Lyon, 9 avril 2019, n° 18LY00798 >> .. << CAA Paris. 16 janvier 2014. n° 13PA02378 » et « CAA Bordeaux, 4 mars 2020, n° 19BX04489 » n "existent pas soit qu'aucune décision juridictionnelle n'existe avec le numéro indiqué soit q11e les numéros de ces affaires ne correspondant pas aux dates y accolées .. Quant à la décision« CE, 30 décembre 1013, n° 367533 », elle n·est pas relative à une question de fond relative à une assignation à résidence. Il y a donc lieu d'inviter le conseil du requérant à vérifier à l'avenir que les références trouvées par quelque moyen que ce soit ne constituent pas une « hallucination » ou une :< confabulation ».

Énièmes tribulations de l’IA en justice : Une requête cite des jurisprudences... totalement inventées.

Le juge administratif tance l'avocat.

Et l'invite « à vérifier à l'avenir que les références trouvées par quelque moyen que ce soit ne constituent pas une "hallucination" ou une "confabulation"»…

Mood

Would definitely feel like Xmas to said reviewer

Temporal distribution of books in the corpus

📚 MajinBook: an impressive new dataset by Antoine Mazières & @tpoibeau.bsky.social. Metadata for 500,000 books from Library Genesis & GoodReads. Mostly books from the last 100 years or so, see the plot ⬇️ arxiv.org/abs/2511.11412

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Le localisme universitaire, nouvelles évaluations En analysant près de 8 000 recrutements à la maîtrise de conférences en France entre 2017 et 2024, Olivier Godechot, Rachel Issiakou, Yann Renisio et Adrien Rougier reviennent sur la question ancienne et controversée du localisme académique.

En analysant près de 8 000 recrutements à la maîtrise de conférences en France entre 2017 et 2024, Olivier Godechot, Rachel Issiakou, Yann Renisio et Adrien Rougier reviennent sur la question ancienne et controversée du localisme académique.

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Screenshot of a Tweet pointing out that academic spam is actually in its own way kind of encouraging.

I think about this post every day 🧪

Looking forward to the inaugural @epssnet.bsky.social meeting in Belfast, 18–20 June 2026!

All political scientists encouraged to submit a paper. For work on public policy & administration, consider section I’m co-chairing w/ @asmusletholsen.bsky.social

⏳ 7 Nov 2025
🔗 epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

Comme annoncé, la revue Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales vous invite à venir fêter son 50e anniversaire le 6 novembre 2025 à partir de 18h au Point Éphémère, 200 quai de Valmy, dans le 10e arrondissement à Paris (M° Jaurès, Louis Blanc). Ci-dessous, le programme de la soirée.

C'est d'ailleurs l'argument principal du dernier livre de @emilymbender.bsky.social et @alexhanna.bsky.social (The AI Con. How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want).

My pleasure, @hendrik-erz.de.

The 🇸🇪 ritual had me realize how much this varies across countries.

With or without: an audience / revisions / questions from stakeholders / a sword (hi 🇫🇮)/ a public march (hi Oxford) / family ...

Is there a sociology of PhD defense (poke @pverschu.bsky.social )?