Cat Dang Ton

At Eastern Sociological Society's 2026 conference, I presented my research on how friends, community members and "weak ties"of the deceased provide practical and financial support at their end of life by authoring memorial crowdfunding campaigns.

2 years in the making (and counting). Stay tuned!

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...

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/...

We crushed it!

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.

Dear they/thems in Chicago/surrounding areas.
I am ISO subject-participants for a documentary photo project about us nonbinary/genderqueer folx. This is a fun + beautiful project about real people in 2025. Please get in touch. Ty!!! Dr Jess Westbrook (they/them)
email: jessparriswestbrook@gmail.com

Are there any sociologists out there doing prison/jail education who'd be willing to share a syllabus?

What happens when the internet disappears? Huge swaths of the web are vanishing. What does that do to our culture?

I'm at @theverge.com today talking about digital decay, link rot, watching my work slowly being erased from the internet, and how it makes me feel like I am fading away.

#RPVSky

One of the first things I teach my students *and* my thesis advisees is how to develop a writing practice.

Perhaps the most challenging thing in the #HiddenCurriculum of being a graduate students, one of the many things I wasn't taught, was the idea of a writing practice, the "how to".

Dualism:

ok diogenes

Philosophy Tube I'm giving away a philosophy degree for free! Subscribe to learn and boost your brain power!

Not a book, but this channel is what got me into philosophy at high school age (scroll down to their older stuff)

MIT has a program: sts-program.mit.edu/academics/gr...

Distinctive negative reactions to intermediate social groups Although considerable research has examined how members of advantaged groups think and feel about disadvantaged groups, fewer studies have examined responses to “intermediate” social groups—groups th....

@sarahburke03.bsky.social wrote an article that has findings along these lines

doi.org/10.1111/jasp...

Omg imagine a #accountabilitybuddysky feed thats just like this

The Limits of Data Policymakers want to make decisions based on clear data, but important factors are lost when we rely solely on data. A philosopher writes:

Wise words from C. Thi Nguyen for a world chasing measurements. issues.org/limits-of-da...

Thanks! Maybe lawyerspeak, fundraising-speak and standup comedy-speak aren’t assertions because the speakers are in the business of selling confidence? It’s a performance, like in theater. They need audience buy-in, which requires making truth claims.

Do you have reading recs for these concepts for newbies? A typology of assertions, speech acts etc? I’d love to learn more

To everyone in a similar scenario: the tactic my doctor's office has taught me is to ask, in writing, for:
1) the name, board specialty, and license number of the doctor making the determination the treatment was not medically necessary;

IMO digital indexing = making an item keyword-searchable with tags. The bluesky search bar shows posts that contain search terms, so that could be a way to retrieve tagged items.

As a reminder, Pleias models are pretrained on open data under either a permissible license or uncopyrighted content. Demo shows you can be fun and ethical. bsky.app/profile/dori...

I see you’re using quote posts as an indexing method + contributing to feeds. cool practice!

Distinctive negative reactions to intermediate social groups Although considerable research has examined how members of advantaged groups think and feel about disadvantaged groups, fewer studies have examined responses to “intermediate” social groups—groups th....

Americans sometimes react dismissively toward both biracial people and bisexual people. Is this a coincidence, or is there something about being seen as "intermediate" that evokes a dismissive reaction?
Article: doi.org/10.1111/jasp...
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

This is what's so baffling about so many suggestions for AI in the humanities classroom: they mistake the product for the point. Writing outlines and essays is important not because you need to make outlines and essays but because that's how you learn to think with/through complex ideas.

This new paper by Caltech and UC Riverside (UCR) scientists tries to quantify the public health implications of AI, and it’s pretty devastating. ChatGPT might cost us a lot more than just our data.

NB: It’s a pre-print. arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288

Asiandroid: Techno-Orientalism and the AI Imaginary Author(s): Fernandez, Leslie J | Advisor(s): Vint, Sherryl | Abstract: My dissertation develops a cultural history of techno-Orientalist discourse through a close reading of the long history of androi...

First thing i thought of is something along these lines. escholarship.org/uc/item/9qb8...

Feminist Spatial Practices | FSP A platform for celebrating the diverse ways that creatives practice feminism in the built environment.

I really love digital humanities projects like feministspatialpractices.com/about that assemble so much knowledge, tangentially inform my work and cultural practice, are outside my filter bubble so completely that I don’t recognise a single member’s name, and fully speak to my heart.

I’d consider where it’s conducted and who is invoking it? Simulacra and all.

!!

Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television Every day, officers working at international airports investigate potential risks to state safety and security. But how do they decide who they can trust, and also ensure that the broader public trus...

Can TV teach us to trust some and not others?
In our latest article, we explore how Border Security officials carry out investigations, and what the show teaches viewers to think about different people
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

New piece I co-authored on protecting AI training rights for scholars