About me
I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Utrecht University (UU) and the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). My research is concerned with cooperation of agents in extra-legal environments and the potential negative consequences of such cooperation. Currently, I am exploring the functioning of reputation systems in cryptomarkets utilizing automatic text analysis. I am working under the supervision of dr. Wojtek Przepiorka and prof.dr. Vincent Buskens.
I am the Student Representative of the Rationality and Society section of the American Sociological Association for 2022-2023. I am also a Junior Member of the Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) of the Utrecht University and the Vice-chair of the Young Complexity Researchers Utrecht (YCRU).
My areas of interest include trust and cooperation, social norms, economic sociology, and sociology of culture. I am particularly interested in how individuals across different social groups and contexts come to trust each other and successfully cooperate, developing and changing shared social norms and institutions along the way. I am also intrigued by how numerical properties of groups can lead to structural inequalities in societies, and how these inequalities can be remedied. Finally, I have a substantive interest in how individuals and groups innovate and how communities evolve. To study these topics, I use computational methods, including machine learning, automatic text analysis, agent-based modeling, statistical models, and network analysis. 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 (March 2023) here, and visit my Utrecht University home page or Google Scholar profile.
Finally, please feel free to contact me at: a.macanovic [at] uu [dot] nl
Peer-reviewed publications
- Macanovic, A. 2022. Text Mining for Social Science – The State and the Future of Computational Text Analysis in Sociology. Social Science Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102784
Working papers
Macanovic, A., and Przepiorka, W. 2022. A Systematic Evaluation of Text Mining Methods for Short Texts: Mapping Individuals’ Internal States from Feedback Texts and Tweets. Under review. Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cerzs
Macanovic, A., and Morando, D.* “I Heard it on the (Silk)Road”: Structural and Cultural Pathways to Novelty Introduction in an Online Community. Under review. Available upon request.
* denotes equal authorship
Work in progress
Macanovic, A., Przepiorka, W., and Buskens, V. Does the Grapevine Still Matter? The Importance of Gossip in the Presence of Formalized Reputation Measures in Online Markets. In preparation.
Macanovic, A., Tsvetkova, M., Przepiorka, W., and Buskens, V. Signals of Belonging: Emergence of Signalling Norms as Facilitators of Parochial Cooperation. In preparation.
Zhang, S., Macanovic, A., and Holmes, T. Minority group size moderates inequity-reducing strategies in homophilic networks. In preparation.