About me

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at Utrecht University.

Prior to this, I was a Max Weber Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute (EUI) and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Radboud University (RU).

I obtained my PhD at the Department of Sociology, Utrecht University (UU) under the supervision of dr. Wojtek Przepiorka and prof.dr. Vincent Buskens.

My areas of interest include economic sociology, innovation, inequalities, and trust and cooperation. I am interested in how structural inequalities arise in societies and how they can be addressed. I am also intrigued by the processes of individual and group-level innovation and the evolution of norms and cultural practices. Finally, I study how individuals from diverse social backgrounds come to trust each other and work together effectively, developing and changing shared social norms and institutions along the way.

I explore these topics with the help of computational methods, including automatic text analysis, machine learning, network analysis, and agent-based modelling. Broadly, I am interested in the study of societies as complex systems.

Below you can find a brief list of my publications and work in progress. You can find more detailed information on my research projects here and read about my professional and teaching activities here. You can also find my up-to-date CV (Nov 2025) here, and visit my Google Scholar profile.

Finally, please feel free to contact me at: a.macanovic [at] uu [dot] nl

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Peer-reviewed publications

• Macanovic, A., Przepiorka, W. 2024. A Systematic Evaluation of Text Mining Methods for Short Texts: Mapping Individuals’ Internal States from Online Posts. Behavior Research Methods (online), doi: 10.3758/s13428-024-02381-9. Available here.

• Macanovic, A., Tsvetkova, M., Przepiorka, W., and Buskens, V. 2023. Signals of Belonging: Emergence of Signalling Norms as Facilitators of Trust and Parochial Cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 379, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0029. Preprint available here.

• Macanovic, A., Przepiorka, W. 2023. The Moral Embeddedness of Cryptomarkets: Text Mining Feedback on Economic Exchanges on the Dark Web. Socio-Economic Review, mwad069, doi: 10.1093/ser/mwad069. Available here.

• Macanovic, A. 2022. Text Mining for Social Science – The State and the Future of Computational Text Analysis in Sociology. Social Science Research, doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102784. Available for download here.

Other publications

• Macanovic, A. 2025. Sifting Through Text and Time – Computational Text Analysis for Historical Sociology. Nature Machine Intelligence. doi: 10.1038/s42256-023-00783-6. Available for reading here.

• Ollion E., Shen, R., Macanovic, A., Chatelain, A. 2024. The dangers of using proprietary LLMs for research. Forthcoming as a Chapter in the Research Handbook of Historical Sociology edited by M.H.D. van Leeuwen.

Work in progress

* denotes equal authorship

• Macanovic, A., Hofstra B. Limits to Gender Equity in Scientific Communication Under review.

• Pial, T., Macanovic, A., Sage, L., Hassan, E., Hafner, F., Skiena, S., van de Rijt, A., Emery, T. Fertility Prediction with Foundational Large Language Models Trained on Population Registry Data. In preparation.

• De Vaan, M, Hofstra, B., Macanovic, A., van de Rijt, A. Societal Segregation: Disentangling Choice from Opportunity Using Dutch Register Data. In preparation.

• Edlund, P., Macanovic, A., van de Rijt, A. The Matthew Effect in Science Funding: Resources or Status? In preparation.

• Macanovic, A. Accuracy of Group Reasoning and Estimation Under Social Influence. In preparation.

• Macanovic, A., Przepiorka, W., Buskens, V. Governing the Agora: The Role of Informal Communication in Reputation-Based Online Markets. In preparation.

• Wittek, M., Macanovic, A., Nägel C., Pickartz M. The Online and Offline Effects of Terror Attacks on Public Opinion Regarding Immigration. In preparation.

• Ollion E., Shen, R., Macanovic, A., Chatelain, A. ChatGPT for Text Annotation? Mind the Hype!. Preprint available here

• Zhang, S., Macanovic, A. Minority group size moderates inequity-reducing strategies in homophilic networks. In preparation.