Elle Johnston

Elle Johnston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Broadly, her research is concerned with understanding social categories and their valuation, as well as developing and improving computational methodologies toward this end. She has a particular interest in studying the social construction of gender. Her current methodological projects focus on improving measurement of bipolar concepts with word embeddings (a method developed by natural language processing scholars for representing word meanings quantitatively) and on leveraging word embeddings to measure lexical contrast, i.e. the extent to which two words are opposed. Her dissertation is focused on (i) measuring the semantic structure of gender in a century of English-language fiction and (ii) assessing to what extent the feminization of STEM fields is associated with their being perceived as “unscientific” or “lacking rigor,” and whether this relates to the rise of anti-science attitudes more generally.