CSDE Workshop - Text As Data
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Text data has gained popularity over the last decade due to the increased data availability, the emergence of new methods, and the decreasing costs of computational resources. Based on the book Text As Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences, this workshop introduces the methods that could be used to select and represent text, conduct research discoveries, and build measurements out of text data. A specific focus is put on building measurements/labels out of unstructured text data using both supervised approach and generative LLMs. We will review the principles briefly, take an overview of the methods for each section, and deep dive into one or two of the most common methods using Python. This workshop is designed to help researchers in social science and demography with no prior experience in working with text.
A free Google Colab account is recommended to run the workshop demos.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Workshops.
Tuesday, October 21, 2025, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. The Big Read: Keynote Conversation with David J. Staley
This year’s featured author is David J. Staley, professor of history at The Ohio State University and author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. In his work, Staley challenges us to reimagine higher education not as a fixed institution but as a space of continual transformation. What if students were required to major in three disparate subjects? What if universities placed play at the center of learning, or designed curricula around broad cognitive skills rather than departments? Through bold “What if?” questions, Staley opens the door to radical and inspiring visions for the university of the future.
Professor Staley will be in conversation with UW College of Arts & Sciences Dean Dianne Harris. Together, they will explore how higher education might evolve and what possibilities lie ahead for universities like ours. This conversation connects directly to the College’s Rethinking the Academy initiative, inviting our community to think big-picture about the futu…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Accessibility Contact: Greta Essig. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Special Events. Target Audience: UW students, faculty, and staff.
Tuesday, October 21, 2025, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
For more info visit artsci.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Will von Geldern
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Reality or Perceived Reality? Exaggerated Perceptions of American Polarization | UW CSSS SEMINAR
Center for Statistics and Social Sciences
Abstract: Political polarization is often invoked as a catch-all explanation for societal conflict and policy gridlock. Yet this broad usage can obscure more than it clarifies, making it harder to address the real dynamics at play. While polarization appears to permeate many aspects of life—from policy preferences to emotional and moral divides—treating it as the root cause of every disagreement offers little in the way of solutions. In this seminar, I present that the key to understanding polarization lies not just in ideological differences but in how people perceive those differences. Specifically, I highlight how misperceptions about the opposing side drive perceived ideological polarization, and how these misperceptions are shaped by like-minded media consumption and talk networks. I also demonstrate that the role of communication in reinforcing or mitigating these perceptions varies across policy domains, providing a more nuanced understanding of how (perceived) polarization operates—and how we might…
Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
SAV 409.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Workshop - Intro to R I: Objects & Programming
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
This workshop is a 75 minute introduction to the various types of objects used in the R language and basics of programming. We will cover vectors, matrices, data.frames, tibbles, and lists, as well as for loops, while loops, and functions. This is a great workshop for those who have never used R before, as well as experienced R users who work predominantly within the tidyverse.
This workshop is the first in a series of 3 workshops, and will be followed by Intro to R II: Working with Data and Intro to R III: Data Visualization.
The workshop will be remote and a Zoom link for online attendance will be provided upon registration.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Accessibility Contact: CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Workshops.
Thursday, October 23, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Seminar: "Fit for Habitation Only by the Negro:" Draining the Wretched Lowcountry Swamp, 1895-1915 - Morgan Vickers
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Speaker: Morgan Vickers, Assistant Professor of Law, Societies, and Justices, University of Washington
Abstract: In 1895, South Carolina produced its post-Reconstruction Constitution, a document explicitly designed to disenfranchise Black South Carolinians through the implementation of restrictive voting laws, the invention of new counties, and the redefinition of a “person” to only include white men. Just five years later, in 1900, the State passed its First Amendment, which legally mandated the condemnation and drainage of all swamplands in the State, ecological spaces most commonly inhabited by poor Black people. The drainage effort was spearheaded by a man named James Cosgrove, the self-proclaimed “Apostle of Drainage in the South,” who argued that “no longer will we permit our lands to remain in a condition fit for habitation only by the negro,” and, instead, it was the project of the turn-of-the-century State to “make our waste places the fairest and dearest spot in all the world, [a] fit dwelling…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_szMkMjN2RKGHGm55g6REdw#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, October 24, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Chris Soria
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Supporting Human-Human Communication: Towards a Proactive AI Paradigm | UW CSSS SEMINAR
Center for Statistics and Social Sciences
Abstract: Recent years have seen a gold rush towards replacing people with AI agents in communication: they can serve as your therapist, your tutor, your financial advisor, your interviewer. In this talk I will propose a contrasting vision: one where AI is used for supporting humans in their communication while preserving their agency. Achieving this vision requires moving beyond the current transactional paradigm embodied by current generative AI systems, which are designed to fulfill the immediate goals of a single person, such as answering a question, solving a math problem, booking a flight, or (repeatedly) replying in character. To meaningfully support human-human communication without disrupting or supplanting it, an AI system must instead follow a proactive paradigm: it needs to decide when to intervene to offer support as the interaction unfolds, rather than wait to explicitly be prompted as AI agents and chatbots do today. In this talk I will present initial progress on AI technologies that enable…
Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
SAV 409.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Seminar: Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol - Sanyu A. Mojola
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Speaker: Sanyu A. Mojola, Professor of Sociology & Public Affairs, Princeton University
Abstract: Washington, DC, the capital of the United States, has the nation’s largest racial life expectancy gap, and it has experienced many of the nation’s worst epidemics, including maternal and infant mortality, homicide, heroin overdoses, and HIV/AIDS. These epidemics have disproportionately affected African Americans. Why and how does racial health inequality exist and persist? Starting from the city’s founding in the late 1700s and drawing on a range of sources—including archival material, life history interviews, and census, vital statistics, and disease surveillance data—this book illustrates how the physical, social, and policy design of the city contributes to the production and reproduction of disproportionate Black death.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_L8YO5FRnRVKdCIHIcufwLw#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, October 31, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Chaytan Inman
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Statistical Approaches to Studying Primate Functional Morphology and Locomotion | UW CSSS SEMINAR
Center for Statistics and Social Sciences
Abstract: Reconstructing early hominin locomotion is a central task for understanding the origin of the human lineage because locomotion provides access to key evolutionary resources including food, water, shelter, and potential mates. This talk will focus on three-dimensional geometric morphometric (i.e. the statistical analysis of shape) approaches to investigating primate foot functional morphology. Such approaches include high-dimensional sliding semilandmark, coherent point drift, and weighted spherical harmonics analyses to investigate the external shape and internal structure of the primate foot, providing the necessary context to reconstruct aspects of early hominin locomotor repertoires. .
Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
SAV 409.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Workshop - Intro to R II: Working With Data
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
This workshop is a 75 minute introduction to data manipulation in R. We will cover reading and writing data, summarizing data, creating new variables, and moving between long and wide data formats.
This workshop is the second in a series of 3 workshops, and will be followed by Intro to R III: Data Visualization.
The workshop will be remote and a Zoom link for online attendance will be provided upon registration.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Accessibility Contact: CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Workshops.
Thursday, November 6, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM.
CSDE Biodemography Working Group Meeting
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Thursday, November 6, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.
Sociology Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/91663439807. Campus room: SAV 409. Accessibility Contact: To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: (206) 543-6450/V, (206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-7264 (FAX), or dso@u.washington.edu. Event Types: Meetings. Target Audience: Sociology Faculty.
Thursday, November 6, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
CSDE Seminar: Growing up in the UK: Child Development in a Complex System - Chia Liu
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Speaker: Chia Liu, Associate Lecturer of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_W41BWLM6RbiWlb9V3T76EQ#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, November 7, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Veterans Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2025. Quarter: Autumn. Event Types: Academics.
Tuesday, November 11, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Lauren Woyczynski & Jessica Godwin
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Generative Climate Modeling: Emulation and Dimension Reduction | UW CSSS SEMINAR
Center for Statistics and Social Sciences
Seminar Abstract coming soon! Xinwei Shen is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington. Her research interests include distributional learning, causality, robustness, and applications in climate science.
Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
SAV 409.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Workshop - Intro to R III: Data Visualization
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
This workshop is a 75 minute introduction data visualization in R. We will cover all major types of plots in both base R and the tidyverse
The workshop will be remote and a Zoom link for online attendance will be provided upon registration.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Workshops.
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Seminar: Deep Mapping Grief and Loss in the Context of Migration - José Alavez
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Speaker: José Alavez, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Washington.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZLjbB0QjSGCsNGHnvOnvcg#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, November 14, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Sruly Rosenblat, Ilan Strauss
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. The Global Burden of Disease Study: A 34-year journey to make the invisible visible | UW CSSS SEMINAR
Center for Statistics and Social Sciences
Abstract: The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study is a systematic and collaborative effort to provide comprehensive and comparable health estimates worldwide. The GBD’s ability to provide a complete picture of health, even in data-scarce environments, has been instrumental in shifting global health priorities. In this talk, Rob will discuss the ongoing challenges and innovations, including the increasing use of electronic health record data in the GBD, the development of methods to handle sparse and conflicting data, as well as the expanding collaborations with local and national policy makers that aim to turn GBD evidence into action. Rob will also highlight future directions in relation to his work at GBD, such as an increasing focus on socially excluded groups. Rob Aldridge is a Professor in the Department of Health Metrics Sciences at University of Washington and leads the Clinical Informatics team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), where he contributes to the Global…
Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
SAV 409.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Seminar: A Demographer’s View of Education and Dementia: Patterns, Predictability, and Persistence
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Speaker: Hyungmin Cha, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Washington
Abstract: Education is one of the strongest predictors of dementia, but its influence extends well beyond whether individuals develop the condition. In this talk, I synthesize three projects that examine how education shapes the functional form, timing, and cumulative duration of dementia experiences. Using nationally representative longitudinal data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, I show that (1) dementia risk declines linearly with additional years of schooling, with a notable threshold reduction at high school completion; (2) education postpones dementia onset and reduces variability in its timing, such that college-educated adults experience both later and more predictable onset; and (3) higher life-course socioeconomic status extends dementia-free life expectancy and compresses the years lived with dementia. Together, these studies position education as a fundamental cause of dementia disparities, shaping not…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_niBJ_KdpT2a3JP5sVf5v_A#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, November 21, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Thanksgiving Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2025. Quarter: Autumn. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, November 27, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Native American Heritage Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2025. Quarter: Autumn. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, November 28, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Survey Sampling in Difficult Contexts | UW CSSS SEMINAR
Center for Statistics and Social Sciences
Abstract: This talk will focus on applying principles of survey sampling, such as sampling frames, stratification, and clustering, to developing and unstable contexts. This work is particularly challenging given a frequent lack of pre-existing data and ethical challenges relating to both enumerators and respondents. The presentation will draw on the speaker's experience fielding face-to-face surveys in Colombia and South Sudan as well as current work designing future face-to-face surveys in Iraq and Ukraine. Gabriella Levy is a political scientist who studies the ways that individuals and societies react to and come to terms with political violence in countries in or emerging from civil conflict or other forms of large-scale instability. She focuses on Latin America, particularly Colombia, and primarily uses survey methodologies. .
Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
SAV 409.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Biodemography Working Group Meeting
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Thursday, December 4, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.
Sociology Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/91663439807. Campus room: SAV 409. Accessibility Contact: To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: (206) 543-6450/V, (206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-7264 (FAX), or dso@u.washington.edu. Event Types: Meetings. Target Audience: Sociology Faculty.
Thursday, December 4, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
CSDE Fall 2025 Lightning Talks & Poster Session
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Campus room: 221. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, December 5, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. Christmas Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, December 25, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. New Year's Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Winter. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, January 1, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu.