Curriculum Vitae

Hendrik Erz, M.A.

A picture of me Sociology, Political Economy, and Computational Text Analysis

Address: Institute for Analytical Sociology
Linköpings Universitet
Kopparhammaren 7, Entrance 56D, Room 471
Campus Norrköping
Work email: hendrik.erz@liu.se
ORCID: 0000-0003-0775-5919

Education

PhD in Analytical Sociology, Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS)

Since 2020 | From Speeches to Bills: How do Discursive Dynamics Shape Policy in the USA and Germany? (Working Title)
Supervisors:

Jacob Habinek (Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden)
Étienne Ollion (École Polytechnique, Paris, France)

M.A. Social Sciences, University of Bonn

2014 – 2017 | Thesis: Salafi-Jihadi Terrorism and the War on Terror as Stasis

B.A. History / Political Science, University of Bonn

2011 – 2014 | Thesis: The Roman Mos Maiorum as a Neo-Institutional Institution

Current Projects

Discursive Dynamics in Policy Making: Extracting economic policy speech and stances from the U.S. Congressional Records (CREC) with RoBERTa models (Project description: https://supr.naiss.se/public/project/28328/).

The computations are enabled by resources provided by the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering (c3se), partially funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) through grant agreements no. 2022-06725 and no. 2018-05973.

Publications

Erz, H., 2020a. Operative Porträts: eine Bildgeschichte der Identifizierbarkeit von Lavater bis Facebook. Von Roland Meyer. Soziologiemagazin 2020, 75–81. https://doi.org/10.3224/soz.v13i1.07

Erz, H., 2020b. The Status Quo is a Dystopian Nightmare. engagée 9, 20–25.

Erz, H., 2020c. Künstliche Intelligenz und Daten: Eine Evaluation softwarebasierter militärischer Informationsgewinnung (Research Report No. 4). IFSH, Hamburg.

Erz, H., 2019a. Rezension zu Neoliberalismus — Wie alles anfing: Das Walter Lippmann Kolloquium, verfasst von Hendrik Erz. Soziologieblog. URL https://soziologieblog.hypotheses.org/12990 (accessed 10.23.19).

Erz, H., 2019b. Der lange Schatten von Gustave Le Bon. Zum sprachlichen Einfluss der Crowd Science auf die Soziologie der Gewalt. Soziologiemagazin 2019, 71–88. https://doi.org/10.3224/soz.v12i2.06

Erz, H., 2018. Karl Marx und das digitale Zeitalter, in: Klasse, Kapital und Revolution. 200 Jahre Marx. Dietz, Bonn, pp. 145–156.

Erz, H., 2017a. Zygmunt Bauman: Die Angst vor den anderen. Widerspruch 70, 164–168.

Erz, H., 2017b. Die (Ver)fassung wahren – „Constitutional Cultures in Comparative Perspective“ (Tagungsbericht). Soziologiemagazin.

Erz, H., 2016. Über den Einfluss des Islam. friedrichs wilhelm.

Erz, H., 2015. Die Postmoderne. Radikale Moderne oder neue Epoche? Politik und Gesellschaft 2, 79–96.

Erz, H., Menshikova, A., 2023. Text als Daten: Extraktion von Variablen mittels LSTM-Netzwerken. Polarisierte Welten. Verhandlungen des 41. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Bielefeld 2022 41.

Schulz, A., Erz, H., Riedl, V., 2019. How to make a Soziologiemagazin. Soziologiemagazin 12.

Presentations

2023

Language Models from the Sweatshop? Towards Guidelines For CSS Researchers to Avoid Ethical and Legal Issues With Off-The-Shelf Software.: International Conference on Computational Social Sciences (IC2S2), Copenhagen, Denmark. [Poster]
From Speeches to Bills: How do Discursive Dynamics Shape Policymaking in U.S. Congress?: Conference of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists (INAS), Princeton, United States.
Taming Rogue Ethics: The Case for a Unified and Fair IRB Procedure: STS-hub.de Conference, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen, Germany
Disentangling the Discourse on U.S. Economic Policymaking: Textual Politics Conference, Sciences Po, Paris, France. (Conference Website)

2022

Text als Daten: Extraktion von Variablen mittels LSTM-Netzwerken: Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, Bielefeld, Germany.
Extracting Agency from Textual Data Using LSTM Networks: Conference of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists, Florence, Italy.
Technological A11y: Zettlr Beyond the Code: Invited Talk; Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany

2019

From Arab Spring to Gilets Jaunes: Riots and the annihilation of legality: Historical Materialism Athens Conference, Greece.

2017

Terrorismus und der War on Terror: Master Thesis Presentation, Studentischer Soziologiekongress, TU Chemnitz, Germany.

Work Experience

Researcher in Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence: Oct. 2019 – Sept. 2020; Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH), University of Hamburg
Research Assistant (WiMi) (domestic policy; digitalisation): Oct. 2017 – Sept. 2019; Department for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn
Research Assistant (WHF) (Systems Administration): Aug. 2016 – Sept. 2017; Department for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn
Student Assistant (SHK) (Data Analysis): May 2016 – Jul. 2016; Center for Developmental Research (ZEF), University of Bonn

Teaching Experience

Behavioral Mechanisms in the Social Sciences: Nov.–Dec. 2023; M.Sc.-level course; instructor; Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
Logic of Social Inquiry (Teaching Assistant for Jacob Habinek): Aug.–Oct. 2023; M.Sc.-level course; Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
Summer Institute for Computational Social Sciences (SICCS): June 2023; lecture & workshop on Computational Text Analysis (view schedule); Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
Digital Strategies for the Social Sciences (Teaching Assistant for Étienne Ollion): April 2023; labs on Web Scraping with R; Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
Logic of Social Inquiry (Teaching Assistant for Jacob Habinek): Oct. 2022; M.Sc.-level course; Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
Logic of Social Inquiry (Teaching Assistant for Jacob Habinek): Oct. 2021; M.Sc.-level course; Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
Introduction to Marxist Political Theoretical Thinking: Apr. 2018 – Sept. 2018; B.A.-level reading course; Department for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn
Introduction to Political Science: Oct. 2017 – Mar. 2018; B.A.-level introductory course; Department for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn
Instructor in Statistics: Apr. 2015 – Apr. 2016; Department for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn

Technical Skills

Programming, Script, and Markup Languages

TypeScript/JavaScript; Python; R; Bash; PHP; Rust; SQL; HTML; CSS/LESS/SASS; YAML; JSON; Lua

Frameworks

Node.js; Laravel; Lumen; NumPy; PyTorch; Pandas; Matplotlib; Webpack; Electron

Software & Tooling

VS Code; Jupyter; Stata; R/RStudio; Slurm (HPC scheduler); Zettlr; LaTeX/Overleaf; Nextcloud; Zotero; llama.cpp; Citation Style Language (CSL); AVID ProTools; Apple Logic; and also Microsoft Office

Concepts & Methods

Computational Text Analysis (Large Language Models; Machine Learning-based, tf-idf);
Data Structures (esp. with optimization of big data analysis in mind);
Basic Algorithms (Search, Tree, Graph, MapReduce, …);
Classical ML algorithms (k-means; Latent Dirichlet Allocation)

Language Models (Sequence to Sequence & Text Generation)

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT);
Robustly Optimized BERT (RoBERTa);
Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTM);
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN);
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN);
Generative AI (Llama, Mistral, GPT)

Volunteering & Miscellaneous services

Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University

Administration and Organization, 2023, SICSS IAS
PhD Group Representative 2021 – 2022 (with Maël Lecoursonnais)

Hyperuniversity working group

Research on and dissemination of advanced writing & publishing methods for academics in the social sciences

Zettlr Markdown Editor

Maintainer and main developer

Soziologiemagazin (Open Access Journal)

Chief editor, Social Media, Review