Shilin Jia is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in MACSS. He holds a Ph.D. degree in sociology from the University of Chicago. He received an M.A. degree in sociology from National Chengchi University, Taiwan (2014) and a B.A. degree in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley (2009). His current interest lies in applying computational methods to the study of political culture and organizations, and he loves exploring new types of digitized data to tackle century-old problems.

Shilin has spent years analyzing job transfers of communist party elites in China. It is a project that he built up from scratch by using machines to code party elites’ CVs. His goal is to understand how the party-state has evolved through the division of labor and circulation of its elite members. He is also working on a computational content analysis project tracking ideological changes in the full text of 60 years of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China. The aim of that project is to understand how incompatible ideas in an ideological system can be gradually reconciled and how the concept of “market” was unfettered in that process. More recently, He has started a new project building word-embedding models based on multiple languages of Google N-grams and studying identity formation across language communities. Methodologically, Shilin has more experience in modeling temporal processes and extracting information from various sources of data, especially text data. He is most comfortable working in Python and R. He is also familiar with various types of machine-learning architectures.

Shilin teaches the perspective sequence in the Autumn and Spring. He also teaches an elective class on the theory and method of cultural space.

Office hour link: https://calendar.app.google/kLfecgGYRXPV1ebDA