hello world

I’m an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA. You can read my faculty page here. I come from a theoretical perspective of production of culture, which is basically economic sociology’s attempt since the early 1970s to colonize the sociology of culture and rebuild it on a more structural basis. On an empirical level I dabble in various media but mostly look at how pop songs get popular on the radio. Since there are an enormous number of pop songs this means that at a methodological level I’m mostly interested in diffusion models that can use and interpret data from many different innovations. The kind of thing I do is described in this methods article.

My intent is for this blog to be mostly about technical issues, secondarily about theory, and not at all about politics, daily minutiae, etc. As such it’s probably worth describing my set-up. My computer is a white MacBook and I use TextWrangler for coding and miscellaneous tasks and Lyx for write-up. I use Zotero for citation management. I write the vast majority of my code in Stata but I dabble (awkwardly) in shell scripting.