Profile

My research focuses on the difficulties of using field data to answer empirical questions. Historical and big data fascinate me. I have work on large-scale social change, such as the demise of socialist societies and the trajectories of American labor unions over the entire 20^th century. I am working on a relatively new project on effect of bicycle ridership and urban planning on social behavior.

Economic sociology and data visualization are both areas of current interest. Economic sociology focuses on the origins of markets and monies as opposed to the standard economics approach that explains the working of markets with supply and demand. Data visualization challenges the researcher to present a graphical summary of data, often one that provokes more questions than answers. The graph at right traces changes in union density (the percentage of the labor for in labor unions) in relationship to historical periods of competition between rival labor federations.