About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Radboud University (RU) and the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). I am currently working on a project exploring gender representation of Dutch professors in newspapers and social media with dr. Bas Hofstra.

Before this, I was a PhD Candidate 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.

I was the Student Representative of the Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society 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 former Vice-chair of the Young Complexity Researchers Utrecht (YCRU).

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 (February 2024) here, and visit my Google Scholar profile.

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

---

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 (forthcoming). Preprint 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

• Ollion E., Shen, R., Macanovic, A., Chatelain, A. 2024. The dangers of using proprietary LLMs for research. Nature Machine Intelligence. doi: 10.1038/s42256-023-00783-6. Available for reading here

Work in progress

* denotes equal authorship

• Macanovic, A., Hofstra B. Gendered Accumulation of Fame: Effects of Cumulative Advantage and Network Spillovers on Representation of Dutch Professors in Media. In preparation.

• Ollion E., Shen, R., Macanovic, A., Chatelain, A. 2023. ChatGPT for Text Annotation? Mind the Hype!. Preprint available here

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

• 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.

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