I'm a Professor of Sociology at UNC–Chapel Hill. I study U.S. social movements with computational methods and build open-source tools for computational social science.
Tools
- topica — 40+ topic models (LDA, STM, keyATM, BERTopic, …) behind one NumPy-native interface, validated against reference implementations
- InkBench — a benchmark for evaluating LLM OCR on historical documents
- faSTM — fast Structural Topic Models for R (Rust core)
- social-data-analysis — Claude Code plugins for sociological research
Digital archives
- Dangerous Press — African American newspapers, 1900–1930
- Dare You Fight — W.E.B. Du Bois in The Crisis
- Crisis & Opportunity — forgotten Black sociology
Editor of Social Forces · nealcaren.org





