Curriculum Vitae | Hendrik Erz

Hendrik Erz, M.A.

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Sociology, Political Economy, and Computational Text Analysis

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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:
  1. Jacob Habinek (Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden)
  2. 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. (2015). Die Postmoderne. Radikale Moderne oder neue Epoche? Politik und Gesellschaft, 2, 79–96.
Erz, H. (2016, November 2). Über den Einfluss des Islam. friedrichs wilhelm. http://fw.asta-bonn.de/?p=113175
Erz, H. (2017a). Die (Ver)fassung wahren – „Constitutional Cultures in Comparative Perspective“ [Tagungsbericht]. Soziologiemagazin. https://soziologieblog.hypotheses.org/10891
Erz, H. (2017b). Zygmunt Bauman: Die Angst vor den anderen. Widerspruch, 70, 164–168.
Erz, H. (2018). Karl Marx und das digitale Zeitalter. In Klasse, Kapital und Revolution. 200 Jahre Marx (pp. 145–156). Dietz.
Erz, H. (2019a). Der lange Schatten von Gustave Le Bon. Zum sprachlichen Einfluss der Crowd Science auf die Soziologie der Gewalt. Soziologiemagazin, 2019(2), 71–88. https://doi.org/10.3224/soz.v12i2.06
Erz, H. (2019b, October). Rezension zu Neoliberalismus — Wie alles anfing: Das Walter Lippmann Kolloquium, verfasst von Hendrik Erz [Billet]. Soziologieblog. https://soziologieblog.hypotheses.org/12990
Erz, H. (2020a). Künstliche Intelligenz und Daten: Eine Evaluation softwarebasierter militärischer Informationsgewinnung (Research Report No. 4; p. 60). IFSH.
Erz, H. (2020b). Operative Porträts: eine Bildgeschichte der Identifizierbarkeit von Lavater bis Facebook. Von Roland Meyer. Soziologiemagazin, 2020(1), 75–81. https://doi.org/10.3224/soz.v13i1.07
Erz, H. (2020c). The Status Quo is a Dystopian Nightmare. Engagée, 9, 20–25.
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. https://publikationen.soziologie.de/index.php/kongressband_2022/article/view/1693
Schulz, A., Erz, H., & Riedl, V. (2019). How to make a Soziologiemagazin. Soziologiemagazin, 12(2). https://www.budrich-journals.de/index.php/Soz/article/view/34496

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