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McFarland, Daniel A.
Academic Title
Other Titles
Associate Professor of Sociology and Business (by courtesy)
Director of Stanford's Center for Computational Social Science (via IRiSS)
Contact Information
Admin. Support
Program Affiliations
Dr. McFarland studies the social dynamics that surround and constitute educational systems. He characterizes these dynamics as having identifiable structures or patterns, and argues it is through an understanding of these features that there arises a richer, lasting capacity for organizational change. Dan's early work developed from in-depth studies of high school classroom settings, with special attention placed on the determinants of student engagement and resistance to learning. Since then, he has gone on to research the structure of high school course-taking, the variable qualities of student governments, how extra-curricular activities socialize citizens, and how social networks and membership affiliations influence identity-formation.
Dan's current areas of research concern social network analysis, sociology of knowledge / science, microsociology, organizations, the sociology of education and computational social science. He uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and meshes multiple methods in much of his work (e.g., network analysis; ethnography; agent based simulation; discourse analysis; natural language processing; statistics). He has been involved in a variety of interdisciplinary collaborations with linguists and computer scientists, and has been involved in methodological advances concerning social network dynamics and topic modeling. Dan is currently engaged in a variety of specific projects: NSF research on interdisciplinarity and scientific innovation; comparative study of intellectual social movements; study of emerging transdiciplinary domains in mechano-biology and in premature birth; NSF work on social network variation and evolution; analyses of networks in talk and text (analyses of speeddating and interpersonal notes); and a history of SUSE (1933-present).
Education
- PhD (Sociology), University of Chicago, 1999
- MA (Sociology), University of Chicago, 1995
- BA (Philosophy), University of Chicago, 1993
Time at Stanford
Since 2000
Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology and Organizational Behavior (2006-)
Assistant Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology (2000 - 2006)
Professional Experience
Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Educational Initiatives, Notre Dame (1999-2000);
Lecturer, University of Chicago (1998).
Courses Taught
- Micro-Sociology (Ed 312, Sociology 224)
- Network Analysis (Ed 316, Sociology 369)
- Workshop: Networks, Histories and Theories of Action (With Paolo Parigi, Ed 317, Soc 317)
- Sociology of Knowledge Creation (Ed 320, Soc 330)
- Organizational Analysis (Ed 288, Soc 366)
Recent Publications
McFarland, Daniel A., Christopher D. Manning, Daniel Ramage, Jason Chuang, Jeffrey Heer, and Dan Jurafsky. In press. “Differentiating Language Usage Through Topic Models.” Poetics.(link)
DuBois, Christopher, Carter T Butts, Daniel A McFarland and Padhraic Smyth. In press. “Hierarchical Models for Relational Event Sequences.” Journal of Mathematical Psychology. (link)
McFarland, Daniel A., Dan Jurafsky and Craig Rawlings. 2013. “Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations.” American Journal of Sociology 118 (6), 1596-1649. (pdf)
Dahlander, Linus and Daniel A. McFarland. 2013. “Ties that Last: A Longitudinal Study of Tie Formation and Persistence.” Administrative Science Quarterly 58 (1)69–110. (link)
Stevenson, David K., Gary M. Shaw, Paul H. Wise, Mary E. Norton, Maurice L. Druzin and Daniel A. McFarland. 2012. “Transdisciplinary Translational Science and The Case of Preterm Birth.” The Journal of Perinatology (2012): 1-8. (pdf)
Diehl, David and Daniel A. McFarland (alphabetical listing). 2012. “Classroom Ordering and the Situational Imperatives of Routine and Ritual.” Sociology of Education 85, 4: 326-349.(pdf)
Rajesh Ranganath, Dan Jurafsky, and Daniel A. McFarland. 2012. “Detecting Friendly, Flirtatious, Awkward, and Assertive Speech in Speed-Dates.” Computer Speech and Language 27, 1: 89-115. (pdf)
Wang, Dan J., Xiaolin Shi, Daniel A. McFarland, and Jure Leskovec. 2012. "Measurement error in social network data: A re-classification." Social Networks. July, 34 (4). (pdf)
Rawlings, Craig and Daniel A. McFarland. 2011. “The Ties that Influence: How Social Networks Channel Faculty Grant Productivity.” Social Science Research 40: 1001-17. (pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A., David Diehl, Craig Rawlings. 2011. “Methodological Transactionalism and the Sociology of Education.” Chapter TBD in Frontiers in Sociology of Education, edited by Maureen Hallinan (pp. TBD). Springer Publishing. (pdf)
Diehl, David and Daniel A. McFarland. 2010. “Towards a Historical Sociology of Situations.” American Journal of Sociology 115, 6:1713-1752. (pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A. and Simon Rodan. 2009. “Organization by Design: Supply- and Demand-Side Models of Math Careers.” Sociology of Education 82 (4): 315-343.(pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A., and Carlos Starmanns. 2009. “Inside Student Government.” Teachers College Record 111 (1): 27-54.(pdf)
Bender-deMoll, Skye and McFarland, Daniel A. (alphabetical listing). 2006. "The Art and Science of Dynamic Network Visualization." Journal of Social Structure, vol. 7, no. 2. (pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A. 2006. "Curricular Flows: Trajectories, Turning Points, and Assignment Criteria in High School Math Careers." Sociology of Education 79 (3):177-205.(pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A., and R. Jack Thomas. 2006. "Bowling Young: How Youth Voluntary Associations Influence Adult Political Participation." American Sociological Review 71 (3):401-425.(pdf)(supplement)
McFarland, Daniel A. and Heili Pals. 2005. "Motives and Contexts of Identity Change: A Case for Network Effects." Social Psychology Quarterly 68 (4):289-315.(pdf)
Moody, James, Daniel A. McFarland, and Skye Bender-deMoll. 2005. "Dynamic Network Visualization." American Journal of Sociology 110 (4):1206-1241.(pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A. 2005. "Why Work When You Can Play? Dynamics of Formal and Informal Organization in Classrooms." Chapter 8 in The Social Organization of Schooling, edited by Larry Hedges and Barbara Schneider (pp. 147-174). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.(pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A. 2004. "Resistance as a Social Drama - A Study of Change-Oriented Encounters." American Journal of Sociology 109 (6): 1249-1318.(pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A. 2003. "When Tensions Mount: Conceptualizing Classroom Situations and the Conditions of Student-Teacher Conflict." Chapter 8 in Stability and Change in American Education: Structure, Process and Outcomes. Edited by Marueen Hallinan, Adam Gamoran, Warren Kubitschek, and Tom Loveless (pp. 127-152). New York: Elliot Werner Publications.(pdf)
McFarland, Daniel A. 2001. "Student Resistance: How the Formal and Informal Organization of Classrooms Facilitate Everyday Forms of Student Defiance." American Journal of Sociology 107 (3): 612-78.(pdf)
Current Activities
Lead investigator of the Mimir Project, a study of interdisciplinarity and scientific innovation -- http://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/mimir.shtml
Development of R labs for social network analysis -- http://sna.stanford.edu/rlabs.php
Development of dynamic network visualization -- http://www.stanford.edu/group/sonia/
Stanford Center for Computational Social Science -- https://css-center.stanford.edu
Massive open online course (2nd round) - Organizational Analysis - https://class.coursera.org/organalysis-002/class
Conferences
Published Computer Science Proceedings and Technical Reports
Anderson, Ashton, Daniel A. McFarland, and Dan Jurafsky. 2012. “Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980-2008.” Association of Computational Linguistics, Workshop (ACL Workshop 2012).(pdf)
Chuang, Jason, Daniel Ramage, Daniel A. McFarland, Christopher D. Manning and Jeffrey Heer. 2012. “Large-Scale Examination of Academic Publications Using Statistical Models.” Advanced Visual Interfaces Workshop (AVI Workshop 2012).(pdf)
Nallapati, Ramesh, Xiaolin Shi, Daniel A. McFarland, Jure Leskovec and Dan Jurafsky. 2011. LeadLag LDA: Estimating Topic Specific Leads and Lags of Information Outlets.” International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM, 2011).(pdf)
Nallapati, Ramesh, Daniel A. McFarland, and Christopher Manning. 2011. “TopicFlow Model: Unsupervised Learning of Topic-specific Influences of Hyperlinked Documents.” Artificial Intelligence and Statistics 2011 (AISTATS 2011). (pdf)
Thomas, R.J. and McFarland, D.A. 2010. “Joining young, voting young: the effects of youth voluntary associations on early adult voting.” CIRCLE Working Paper No. 73. Retrieved from Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) website: http://www.civicyouth.org/featured-extracurricular-activities-may-increa...
Ramage, Daniel, Daniel A. McFarland, and Chris Manning. 2010. “Which universities lead and lag? Toward university rankings based on scholarly output.” Neural Information Processing Systems, Workshop (NIPS Workshop, 2010).(pdf)
Shi, Xiaolin, Ramesh Nallapati, Jure Leskovec, Daniel A. McFarland, and Dan Jurafsky. 2010. “Who Leads Whom: Topical Lead-Lag Analysis across Corpora.” Neural Information Processing Systems, Workshop (NIPS Workshop, 2010).(pdf)
Shi, Xiaolin, Jure Leskovec, and Daniel A. McFarland. 2010. “Citing for High Impact.” Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, (JCDL 2010).(pdf)
Ramage, Daniel, Evan Rosen, Jason Chuang, Christopher D. Manning and Daniel A. McFarland. 2009. “Topic Modeling for the Social Sciences.” Neural Information Processing Systems, Workshop (NIPS Workshop, 2009).(pdf)
Ranganath, Rajesh, Dan Jurafsky and Daniel A. McFarland. 2009. “It’s Not You, It’s Me: Detecting Flirting and Its Misperception in Speed-Dates.” Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, 2009).(pdf)
Jurafsky, Dan, Rajesh Ranganath, and Daniel A. McFarland. 2009. “Extracting Social Meaning: Identifying Interactional Style in Spoken Conversation.” North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT, 2009).(pdf)
