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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · 13d

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...

Assistant Professor

This Assistant Professor position will teach graduate and undergraduate courses, conduct research in the field of Sociology, participate in departmental service, and mentor graduate students.

unc.peopleadmin.com

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · 24d

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.

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · 28d

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

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · 28d

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...

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · Sep 4

It used to be much easier to get a faculty position.

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Timmons Roberts @timmonsroberts.bsky.social · Aug 25

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...

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

www.nytimes.com

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Stephen Vaisey 🇺🇦 @stephenvaisey.com · Aug 17

This is an incredible data source!

Alex Selby-Boothroyd @alexselbyb.bsky.social · Aug 17

Musician and data whizz Chris Dalla Riva has painstakingly compiled over 100 datapoints for every US Billboard Hot 100 Number One song since August 4th 1958, and it's now freely available here:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones Database

docs.google.com

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Pamela Oliver @pamelaoliver.bsky.social · Aug 10

@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/

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · Aug 7

I just realized that AJS articles are sorted within each issue by the number of authors and then alphabetically by the first author.

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Tania Hutt @taniahutt.bsky.social · Jul 8

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...

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · Jul 7

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...

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · Jul 6

🤗 Datasets?

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Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist) @fisherdanar.bsky.social · Jun 28

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...

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…

danarfisher.com

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Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist) @fisherdanar.bsky.social · Jun 5

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

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Shannon McGregor, PhD @shannimcg.bsky.social · Jun 4

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...

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.

www.insidehighered.com

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Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · May 30

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...

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.

www.wral.com

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Kate Weisshaar @kateweisshaar.bsky.social · May 28

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...

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.

www.chronicle.com

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Martín Portos @mportosg.bsky.social · May 15

💣💥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...

2025 COSMOS Summer school: Studying protest. Methodological practices in social movement research

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

cosmos.sns.it

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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · May 10

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

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · May 2

This is awesome!

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · May 2

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. +

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...

arxiv.org

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Jay Ulfelder @jayulfelder.bsky.social · Apr 28

If you're an underfunded org or activist doing (broadly speaking) antifascist work and you've got a data-making or data-analysis idea but not the skills to implement it, let's talk!

I've got those skills but no job, so I've got time as well. Happy to add expertise and labor to the right efforts.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · Apr 23

As we were writing this paper the NSF ADVANCE program was "archived" (cancelled). A heavy moment for us mid-paper. The results are important - check it out:

ADVANCE is one of the (if not the) longest running NSF programs, and, unusually for the NSF, is a collaboration among multiple directorates.
🧵

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World @sociusjournal.bsky.social · Apr 23

🏛️ Funding #EquityInitiatives = funding academic careers

New #Socius study by Drs. Gates, @lauraknelson.bsky.social, Grudt & @kzippel.bsky.social finds #NSF #ADVANCE awards help faculty doing #OrganizationalChange work maintain—or boost—#ResearchProductivity.

Read: doi.org/10.1177/2378...

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Derek Willis @dwillis.bsky.social · Feb 28

New blog post: Turning Congressional Job Listings Into Data Using LLM

I had 10 years' worth of weekly House job listings as PDFs. Now they are structured JSON, thanks to the Python library llm and LLMs.

thescoop.org/archives/202...

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Neal Caren @haphazardsoc.bsky.social · Feb 8

I ballparked estimates of a 15% cap on NIH indirects based on awards granted in 2024 (which is different from funded in 2024). My numbers are less than NIH's, but still pretty devastating, including $250 million loss for North Carolina institutions. nih-funding-direct.vercel.app

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