Computational social psychologist. Scholar. Teacher.
I am trained as a social psychologist. I study the micro-sociology of place-making, identity formation, and belonging. My latest research is on identity formation of US Evangelicals in mass media and social media.
My work on belonging has included both discourse analysis and visual spatial semiotics. I have written a book, and edited several others, about urban quotidian mobilities and group dynamics, especially for religious minorities. I began my research career doing discourse analysis and wrote an application, SemioCode, to do the kind of content analysis I was using based on my dissertation. As a result, I developed teaching interests in statistical programming, large sample discourse analysis, and social network analysis. I am fluent in Perl, C, PHP, R, and Python, and have been introducing coding into my courses in social network analysis and quantitative methods.
Courses taught: Data & Society*, Quantitative Methods*, Introductory Statistics*, Advanced Statistics*, Social Networks*, Stratification, Sociology of Science & Technology, Sociology of Religion, Visual Sociology, Sociology of Sport, Introductory Sociology
* includes programming component
Timothy Shortell, Ph.D. 