Hendrik Erz, PhD

A picture of me I'm a postdoctoral researcher at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS). I am a member of the project SynDIKAT, a project funded by the German Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space, where I work as an expert in Social Science Research Methods, Natural Language Processing and Computational Text Analysis methods with a focus on social media disinformation and misinformation.

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Political Sociology • Computational Social Science • Analytical Sociology • Computational Text Analysis/NLP • Legislative Debates • Policymaking • Science of Science • Ethics of AI

On October 20, 2025, I successfully defended my dissertation thesis at Linköping University. You can read more in the university's official press release.

Request the PDF of my thesis

Academic Research

I am currently affiliated with GESIS and CAIS. My research interests range from political and economic sociology to text analysis and computational social science. Find out at which conferences I'll be this year, and see my blog for bits and pieces on everything academic.

Conferences 2026

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Most Recent Article: Algorithmic Alienation and the Freedom of Scarcity

Published November 4th, 2026

Abstract: A few months ago, I have rediscovered my own music library, and I have consciously switched away from both Spotify and Apple Music. I have opened neither app in almost six months at this point. This move was liberating. In this article, I share some observations I have made regarding my own music-listening habits, and why I believe owning your own music is so much better than paying a few bucks each month for access to a streaming service.

Open Source development

In my spare time, I advocate for Open Source. Since at least 2006 I have been a user, supporter, and contributor to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

My main project is Zettlr. It is a "one-stop publication workbench" targeted at students and researchers in the arts and humanities. I started working on it in 2017 and have been the project lead ever since.

After the Twitter-exodus began, I started the go-to list for finding your peers, Academics on Mastodon. It lists hundreds of people from dozens of fields and Mastodon instances so that you can orient yourself in this new social media.

You can find more info on my involvement with software on my GitHub profile.