Much of my work centers around how people use social cues to guide their choices (to select a worthwhile book, to break only irregularly sanctioned norms, to express their true opinions) and how these behaviors interact to bring about hard-to-predict outcomes on the collective level (the emergence of bestsellers, normative change, swings in public discourse).
Besides that, I am passionate about a spatial perspective to sociology.
At IAS, I head an international research group studying the dynamics of public discourse based on vast archives of digitized and online text. Funded by a generous grant from the Swedish Research Council, we develop machine-learning applications for the analysis of text in sociology. Using digitized corpora as social sensors, our research explores sudden swings in public opinion and the emergence of widely shared interpretations of developments and events in society.
My research appeared in journals such as the European Sociological Review, Poetics, Rationality & Society, Social Forces, Sociological Science, and Sociological Methods & Research.
I publish results that are strongly infused by sociological theorizing also in general interest journals, including Environment & Behavior, the Journal of Computational Social Science, Management Science, Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Science Advances, and Scientific Reports.
