Welcome

I (Chinese: 张勇军audio) am a computational social scientist studying politics, organizations, social movements, and inequality. I received my Sociology PhD in 2020 from the University of Arizona. I am currently working as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. I am also a research affiliate at New York University.

I combine statistical, network, and computational methods with large-scale datasets to study social, political, and organizational behavior. My past work focuses on the interplay between social movements and social or political changes in the U.S. and the globe. These studies have been published in Journal of Marriage and Family, Demography, Poetics, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, and PLoS One. I have won the 2020 James Coleman Award from Sociology of Education Section at American Sociological Association and the 2021 SIM Best Paper Submission at Academy of Management. I also joined the Nature HSCOMMS and PLOS One’s Editorial Board recently.

My ongoing work focuses mainly on understanding mobility, segregation, and polarization in the U.S. I am using big data from FEC with corp data to track the polarization/partisanship trend in corporate elites. I am using large-scale GPS data and near-population level voter and consumer records to assess the antecedents and consequences of racial/partisan/income/cultural segregation. This human mobility, segregation, and polarization project has been funded by an OVPR seed grant at Stony Brook University. I am also using deep learning methods to detect and monitor anti-AAPI hate speech and incidents (a direct result of polarization and xenophobia) from Twitter since the COVID-19 outbreak. This project has been funded by a seed grant from IACS at Stony Brook University. Some of these ongoing studies have appeared in top journals such as Chinese Sociological Review, Socius, Scientific Reports, and Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

I am teaching Intro to Computational Social Science and Research Methods in Sociology at Stony Brook University. I co-edited a special issue on computational social science and Chinese societies for Chinese Sociological Review. I also co-organized the 2023 NYU Shanghai site for Summer Institute of Computational Social Science (SICSS).

If you need CSS-related talks or workshops, please feel free to contact me directly.

Download Zhang’s Vita Here.

Click Here to See Data Visualization on Segregation for the AJS Article.

Incoming Students

If you are interested in working with me at Stony Brook, feel free to apply for our program. You can also check this amazing IACS graduate fellowship.

Summer CSS Workshop

I co-organized the 2023 NYU Shanghai site for Summer Institute of Computational Social Science (SICSS) with Dr. Xiaogang Wu and Dr. Yongren Shi. See HERE

I also taught intro to css for NYU Shanghai CASER. Check here for the syllabus.

Frontiers Conversations on Digital Society

I am co-hosting a Brownbag series with Professor Zeqi Qiu at Peking University focusing on digital society and its impact on our world. Our first speaker is Professor Chris Bail.

April 6, 2022, Conversation with Professor Chris Bail at Duke University, Director of Polarization Lab. Click here for more info.

November 10, 2022, Conversation with Professor Esteban Moro at MIT Media Lab. Sponsored by IACS at Stony Brook University.

November 4, 2022, Conversation with Assitant Professor Rebecca Johnson at Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. Sponsored by Sociology at Stony Brook University.

New Paper Alert

Andrew Davis and Yongjun Zhang. 2023. ‘‘Civil Society and Democracy under Pressure: Does Authoritarian Mobilization and Party Incapacity Diminish the Positive Effect of Civil Society?.’’ The Sociological Quarterly.

Yongjun Zhang. 2023. “Spatial Segregation and Voting Behavior among Asian Americans in 2020 General Election.” Social Science Research.

Yue Yu, Yifang Wang, Qisen Yang, Di Weng, Yongjun Zhang, Xiaogang Wu, Yingcai Wu, and Huamin Qu. 2023. ‘‘NeighViz: Towards Better Understanding of Neighborhood Effects on Social Groups with Spatial Data.’’ Visualization in Data Science at IEEE VIS.

Yongjun Zhang, Hao Lin, Yi Wang, and Xinguang Fan. 2023. ‘‘Sinophobia was popular on Twitter during the early COVID-19 pandemic.” Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Yongjun Zhang, Siwei Cheng, Zhi Li, and Wenhao Jiang. 2023. “Human mobility patterns are associated with experienced partisan segregation in US Metropolitan areas.” Scientific Reports.

Charles Seguin, Thomas Maher, Yongjun Zhang. 2023. ‘‘A Seat at the Table: A New Dataset of Social Movement Organization Representation Before Congress during the 20th Century’’. Socius.

Yongjun Zhang and Jennifer Heerwig. 2022. “Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Cash to the U.S. Congress, 1990-2014.” Socius.

Xinguang Fan and Yongjun Zhang. 2022. “Just Virus or Politicized Virus? An Analysis of over 13 Million Global Web News of China on COVID-19.” Chinese Sociological Review.

Hao Lin, Pradeep Nalluri, Lantian Li, Yifan Sun, and Yongjun Zhang. 2022. “Multiplex Anti-Asian Sentiment before and during the Pandemic: Introducing New Datasets from Twitter Mining.” 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis.

Yongjun Zhang, Sienna Thorgusen, and Xinguang Fan. 2022. “News Coverage of Social Protests in Global Society.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

Yongjun Zhang. 2021. “Corporate Responses to COVID19: A Non-Market Strategy Approach.” Sociological Perspectivies.

Charles Seguin, Chris Julien, and Yongjun Zhang. 2021. “The stability of androgynous names: Dynamics of gendered naming practices in the United States 1880–2016.” Poetics

Working Paper

Yongjun Zhang. 2023. “LLVMs4Protest: Harnessing the Power of Large Language and Vision Models for Deciphering Protests in the News.”

Yongjun Zhang. 2023. “Generative AI has lowered the barriers to computational social sciences.”

Yongjun Zhang. 2023. “Multiplex Spatial Segregation of Asian American Voters in New York City.”

Yongjun Zhang and Siwei Cheng. 2023. “Mobility-based Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas.”

Yongjun Zhang and Jennifer Heerwig. 2023. “Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Political Donations of America’s Corporate Elite”.

Yongjun Zhang, Sijia Liu, Yi Wang, and Xinguang Fan. 2022. ‘‘Detecting Fake News on Twitter in the Chinese Language Community.”

Yongjun Zhang. 2021. “Using Population Mobility to Measure Racial Residential Segregation in the U.S. Metro Areas.”

Talks

Yongjun Zhang. Novemeber 2023. “Generative AI and Computational Social Science.” Peking University.

Yongjun Zhang. October 2023. “Quantifying Segregation with Big Data.” Department of Sociology at Queens College. [Poster]

Yongjun Zhang. August 2023. “Experienced Partisan Segregation.” ASA Session on Inequality across Time, Space, and Families.

Yongjun Zhang. July 2023. “Frontiers in Computational Social Science: New Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges.” Nanjing University [Poster].

Yongjun Zhang. June 2023. “An Overview of Computational Social Science”. SICSS NYU-Shanghai.

Yongjun Zhang. March 2022. “Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Political Donations of America’s Corporate Elite”. European University Institute. with Dr. Jennifer Heerwig.

Yongjun Zhang. Dec 2021. “Computational Social Science: Its Recent Development, Opportunities, and Challenges.” Peking University [Poster].

Yongjun Zhang. Oct 2021. “Residential Segregation in U.S. Metro Areas: Using Facebook and Safegraph Data to Assess Racial Segregation.” Department of Sociology, SUNY Buffalo [Poster].

Yongjun Zhang. Oct 2021. “Using Population Mobility Data to Measure Racial Segregation in the U.S.” IACS, Stony Brook University.

Yongjun Zhang. Sept 24, 2021. “Using Relational Data from Facebook and SafeGraph to Measure Racial Segregation.” Department of Physchology, Stony Brook University.

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