Skip to content
View nathanlesage's full-sized avatar

Organizations

@Zettlr

Block or report nathanlesage

Block user

Prevent this user from interacting with your repositories and sending you notifications. Learn more about blocking users.

You must be logged in to block users.

Please don't include any personal information such as legal names or email addresses. Maximum 100 characters, markdown supported. This note will be visible to only you.
Report abuse

Contact GitHub support about this user’s behavior. Learn more about reporting abuse.

Report abuse
nathanlesage/README.md

Sociology meets Software

Random Header Image

Analytical Sociology; Computational Social Sciences; Large Language Models

I'm Hendrik and a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Sweden, where I research the policymaking progress in U.S. Congress and elsewhere using Computational Text Analysis with the help of Linguistics and Transformer/Large Language Models. In my free time, I'm an Open Source contributor, mainly to Zettlr, but I also collaborate with other projects, such as Winter CMS.

My strong suit is the ability to bridge the gap between non-technical research in the arts and humanities and the technical side of software and hardware development. I find it fascinating to throw political and sociological theory at code, and vice versa. I've already done so in various publications (see below), where I explore the political and social ramifications of software on a theoretic level, and currently I am making use of code (specifically Large Language Models) for sociological research.

German (native) English (C1) Swedish (A2) French (A2) Japanese (A1)


Table of Contents

1. Education
2. Professional Experience
3. Teaching Experience
4. Software Development
5. Publications
6. Miscellaneous


Find me on Social Media Bluesky Twitter LinkedIn Instagram

Education

  • PhD (ongoing), Analytical Sociology/Computational Social Science, Linköping University
  • Master of Arts (2017), "Societies, Globalization, and Development" (Gesellschaften, Globalisierung und Entwicklung), University of Bonn
  • Bachelor of Arts (2014), History (major) and Political Sciences & Sociology (minor), University of Bonn

Professional Experience

10/2019 – 09/2020: Researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH)

  • Research on the abilities of software and the development of sensors, embedded devices, and processing environments
  • Interdisciplinary research at the nexus between social science and computer science
  • Read more on the official project page …

10/2017 – 09/2019: Research Assistant at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn

  • General administrative tasks
  • Teaching (four undergraduate courses, see teaching experience)
  • Project Management for a reader on Digital Politics in Germany

05/2016 – 07/2016: Student Assistant for Data Cleaning, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn

  • Management of a large dataset on the food-energy-security nexus in Ethiopia (approx. 300 variables, several million observations)
  • Pre-calculations and shifting of certain indicators for later analytical use by the project's supervisors
  • The final project contained two dozen Stata .do-files, varying in size between 100 and 1.000 lines

04/2015 – 07/2015: Tutor for Statistical Methods, Institute for Political Sciences and Sociology, University of Bonn

  • Two tutorial courses on quantitative data analysis (undergraduate level)
  • Coverage of basic statistics up until linear regression
  • Management of course materials and in-class tasks

05/2014 – 04/2016: Student Assistant at the German Federal Agency for Political Education (bpb), Bonn

  • Taking care of the Drupal-based website
  • Researching content and publishing material on Open Educational Resources (OER)
  • Working with the different departments in publishing content

Teaching Experience

Winter Term 2018/2019

  • Policial Sciences 101 (BMPG)
  • Workflow supercharged: Tooling for academic publishing (PMTP)

Summer Term 2018

  • Political Sciences 101 (BMPG)
  • "Marxismus in der Krise" (Optional courses at the faculty for philosophy)

Software Development

Zettlr Citr OctoberCMS PatreonList OctoberCMS Campaignr

Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows macOS iOS Linux

Programming/Scripting Languages & Frameworks

JavaScript TypeScript LESS Rust C/C++ PHP Python Node.js Electron Vue.js Laravel Lumen PyTorch TensorFlow

Software & Tooling

Stata RStudio Jupyter Notebooks Microsoft Office LibreOffice Zettlr Visual Studio Code Google Chrome Mozilla Firefox Gimp 2 iMovie Steinberg CuBase 5 AVID ProTools Apple Logic iTerm 2 Webpack Gulp GitHub Actions LaTeX Pandoc Zotero CitationStyleLanguage Nextcloud OBS Studio

Publications

  • Erz, H. (2015). Die Postmoderne. Radikale Moderne oder neue Epoche? Politik und Gesellschaft, 2, 79–96.
  • Erz, H. (2016a, June 11). Die äthiopische Frontier [Paper]. Symposium “Why so monochrome?,” Historisches Seminar der Universität Bonn.
  • 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. (2017c, September 15). Terrorismus und der War on Terror [Thesis]. 6. Studentischer Soziologiekongress, TU Chemnitz.
  • Erz, H. (2018a). Karl Marx und das digitale Zeitalter. In Klasse, Kapital und Revolution. 200 Jahre Marx (pp. 145–156). Dietz.
  • Erz, H. (2018b, May 30). Profiteure der Globalisierung [Lecture]. BIMUN/SINUB Lecture Series, University of Bonn.
  • Erz, H. (2018d, October 23). The Free Internet is an Illusion. New Socialist. https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-free-internet-is-an-illusion/
  • Erz, H. (2018e, November 28). Not all Democracies are Created Equal. Ein Demokratievergleich mittels Riots als Stasis [Vortrag]. BIMUN/SINUB Lecture Series, Universität Bonn.
  • Schulz, A., Erz, H., & Riedl, V. (2019). How to make a Soziologiemagazin. Soziologiemagazin, 12(2), Article 2. https://www.budrich-journals.de/index.php/Soz/article/view/34496
  • 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 [Review]. Soziologieblog. https://soziologieblog.hypotheses.org/12990
  • Erz, H. (2020a). Künstliche Intelligenz und Daten: Eine Evaluation softwarebasierter militärischer Informationsgewinnung (Research Report No. 4). IFSH.
  • Erz, H. (2020b). Operative Porträts: Eine Bildgeschichte der Identifizierbarkeit von Lavater bis Facebook. Von Roland Meyer. Soziologiemagazin, 01/2020, 75–81. https://doi.org/10.3224/soz.v13i1.07
  • Erz, H. (2020c). The Status Quo is a Dystopian Nightmare. Engagée, 9, 20–25.

Miscellaneous

I am the webmaster for the International Network of Analytical Sociologists.

Apart from my professional sociological background and my pretty strong background in software development, I also make other things from time to time.

For instance, I once edited my own journal with some friends, I help a lot behind the mixing console and with networking, and I even produced an EP!

Last but not least, I am also an editor of the German academic journal Soziologiemagazin and responsible for review, public relations and all the computer-ish things in the background.

Pinned Loading

  1. Zettlr/Zettlr Zettlr/Zettlr Public

    Your One-Stop Publication Workbench

    TypeScript 10.4k 642

  2. cheatsheet-generator cheatsheet-generator Public

    Generates cheatsheets for your (favourite) apps

    JavaScript 76 10

  3. Zettlr/Citr Zettlr/Citr Public archive

    A small library helping to parse citations between Markdown and CSL JSON

    TypeScript 28 5