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Oscar Stuhler

@oms279.bsky.social

2.5K followers 590 following 44 posts

Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern Culture, political sociology, NLP, social networks, computational social science oscarstuhler.org

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Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · May 7

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.

CREST Sociology @crestsociology.bsky.social · May 7

NEW ARTICLE: Want to use LLMs to extract information at scale in sociology? @eollion.bsky.social @oms279.bsky.social and C. Ton have you covered. Read "From Codebooks to Promptbooks," now in Sociological Methods & Research

doi.org/10.1177/0049...

(Preprint @socarxiv.bsky.social: osf.io/wjvfq_v1)

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Étienne Ollion @eollion.bsky.social · 15d

Come work with us @crestsociology.bsky.social

We are looking for a post-doc with a background in social sciences, interested in NLP and in media & journalism studies.

Details here: www.css.cnrs.fr/post-doctora...

Post-Doctoral Position – Media / Journalism – CSS @ IP-Paris

Site web de l'axe sciences sociales computationnelles du CREST-CNRS. Cours et tutoriels pour l'analyse des données numériques en sciences sociales.

www.css.cnrs.fr

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Samuel Coavoux @scoavoux.bsky.social · Sep 5

Do streaming platforms trap us in cultural filter bubbles? We like to think so but the evidence says otherwise. In a new paper @abelaussant.bsky.social and I find the use of streaming platform to be associated with an increase in consumption diversity. sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

Screenshot of the title and abstract of the article. the title is
Streaming Platforms, Filter Bubbles, and Cultural Inequalities. How Online Services Increase Consumption Diversity. The abstract reads: Do digital technologies affect diversity in cultural tastes? Digital sociologists have warned of “filter bubbles,” whereas sociologists of culture have shown that diversity in consumption is valued as a marker of upper-middle-class status. We estimate the effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption using a matching technique applied to 2018 survey data from France. We find a statistically significant positive effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption as well as on cosmopolitanism, on three domains, music, movies, and TV shows. The magnitude of this effect is much higher for TV shows. The study brings new evidence against the filter bubble thesis; it shows that platforms do reinforce cultural inequalities by increasing the social gap in consumption diversity. It further suggests that the effect of technology on cultural consumption might mainly operate through its impact on cultural markets rather than changes in cultural experience.

Main figure of the article. Difference in number of genres consumed, liked, and disliked between streaming users and non-users. Streaming users consume more genres than non-users after controlling for confounders. The difference is small for music (0.1 sd), moderate for movies (0.2 sd), and high for TV shows (0.46 sd). However, differences
in number of genres liked or disliked are small or not significant. SMD before (light) and after (dark)
adjustment through matching, with error bars indicating 95 percent confidence interva

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Till Hilmar @tillhilmar.bsky.social · Sep 1

👉 Stories about economic change are never neutral. They make politics. In my new article in Sociological Theory @sociologicaltheory.bsky.social, I show how narratives about economic disruption become a source of legitimacy:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · Aug 12

A nice discovery today: #ic2s2 keynotes are on Youtube! In particular, I think the papers listed by @lauraknelson.bsky.social in her keynote could form a great list for a CSS reading group.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXYg...

Laura Nelson: Qualitative Methods for Computational Social Science — IC2S2 2025 Keynote

YouTube video by Institute for Analytical Sociology

www.youtube.com

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

Many thanks to the reviewers and especially to @fuhsejan.bsky.social for his feedback on the paper! Many of the ideas in the paper build on his work.

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

This framework opens a new perspective on the structure of action in social relationships, some aspects of which I explore in the paper. Among other things, I propose a formalization of relational ambiguity and explore some of the conditions under which relationships are more or less ambiguous.

Association structure of relationship frames within action profiles.

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

Through this lens, RFs become probability distributions over actions while any specific relationship is modeled as a distribution over frames.

Figure showing the overall distribution of relationship frames and the distributions for specific relationships.

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

RFs emerge from regularities in the duality of dyad and content. Rather than a priori asserting ‘types of ties,’ I show how RFs can be modeled and inductively inferred from the action content of 1.2 million character relationships in fiction (“what actions often go together in dyads?”).

Image illustrating the actions in a specific relationship together with their direction.

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

I argue that we should approach and study such types as cultural structures. One promising way to do so is to conceptualize them as ‘relationship frames’—cultural blueprints that stabilize relational expectations by helping people make sense of the interaction in relationships.

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

Now out in Social Networks

Network analysis aspires to be “anticategorical,” yet its basic units—relationships—are usually readily categorized ('friendship,' 'love'). Thus, a nontrivial cultural typification is asserted in the very building blocks of most network analyses.

doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

Title and abstract of the paper.

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · Aug 7

Through this lens, RFs become probability distributions over actions while any specific relationship is modeled as a distribution over frames.

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · Aug 1

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:

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

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Benjamin Rohr @benjaminrohr.bsky.social · Jul 18

My paper on the emergence and structure of the first American party system of the 1790s just came out in the American Sociological Review.

doi.org/10.1177/0003...

The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic - Benjamin Rohr, John Levi Martin, 2025

Prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system fail to account for the important case of the United States. Using a novel d...

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Étienne Ollion @eollion.bsky.social · Jul 21

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.

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Christian Rauh @chrauh.bsky.social · Jul 16

🤔 The #EU 🇪🇺 aspires to be a global actor 🌍 — but do other states recognize it as such?

My new study in @intlinteractions.bsky.social develops targeted #NLP / #TextAsData tools to analyze 50 years of foreign policy discourse in the annual #UN General Debate (1970–2020).

A thread (1/n)

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Jun 25

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. +

The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa

Nature Computational Science - Many humanists are skeptical of language models and concerned about their effects on universities. However, researchers with a background in the humanities are also...

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Hannah Waight @hwaight.bsky.social · Jun 18

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/...

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...

journals.sagepub.com

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Samuel Coavoux @scoavoux.bsky.social · Jun 12

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...

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · Jun 10

New NEH-supported tutorial on running LLMs locally with ollama! Your laptop is more powerful than you think. Save money, privacy, and energy.

aiforhumanists.com/tutorials/

The AI for Humanists project is developing resources to enable DH scholars to explore how large language models and AI technologies can be used in their research and teaching. Find an annotated biblio...

aiforhumanists.com

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Danya Lagos @danyalagos.bsky.social · May 13

Had a blast working on this paper with Christina Pao, @chrisajulian.bsky.social, @drcompton.bsky.social, and Lawrence Stacey, in which we combed through the HPS to identify demographic differences between groups based on gender identity question responses. sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

Demographic Differences in Responses to a Two-Step Gender Identity Measure

Article: Demographic Differences in Responses to a Two-Step Gender Identity Measure | Sociological Science | Posted May 6, 2025

sociologicalscience.com

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Marc Keuschnigg @marckeuschnigg.bsky.social · May 13

We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science
📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden
⏰Deadline June 3
🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854
Please apply // help us spread the word

Norrköping campus at sunset

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Simone Zhang @sxz.bsky.social · May 7

Do you field online surveys and experiments? Ever get back text responses that look unusually diplomatic and polished?

In this paper, now out at Sociological Methods & Research, we study the emerging use of AI among online study participants.

Reposted by Oscar Stuhler

Benjamin Rohr @benjaminrohr.bsky.social · May 10

New paper out in Social Science History about elite networks in the American administrative state

doi.org/10.1017/ssh....

Elite cohesion in the American administrative state, 1898–1998 | Social Science History | Cambridge Core

Elite cohesion in the American administrative state, 1898–1998

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · May 7

Here is the updated link journals.sagepub.com/eprint/T3QXU...

From Codebooks to Promptbooks: Extracting Information from Text with Generative Large Language Models - Oscar Stuhler, Cat Dang Ton, Etienne Ollion, 2025

Generative AI (GenAI) is quickly becoming a valuable tool for sociological research. Already, sociologists employ GenAI for tasks like classifying text and simu...

journals.sagepub.com

Oscar Stuhler @oms279.bsky.social · May 7

Thank you! No, nothing major really.