I use computational methods – principally text analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis techniques – to study social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions. Substantively, her research has examined processes around the formation of collective identities and social movement strategy in feminist and environmental movements, continuities between cycles of activism and the role of place in shaping social movement activity, intersectionality in women’s movements and in the lived experiences during the 19th century in the U.S. South, gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship, the translation of academic ideas to practice in the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program (a program aimed at promoting women in STEM field in higher education), and gender inequality in emergency medicine departments. Methodologically, she has proposed frameworks to combine computational methods and machine learning with qualitative methods, including the computational grounded theory framework and leveraging the alignment between machine learning and the intersectionality research paradigm. She has developed and taught courses introducing social science and humanities students to computational methods and the scripting languages Python and R, data science courses, and graduate-level sociological theory. She is currently a co-PI on a million-dollar grant through the National Science Foundation to study the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through higher education networks, primarily in the United States.

My current research projects include examining intersectionality in U.S. women’s movements; coverage of social movements in news media over time; ways in which history is recorded and remembered, particularly related to social movements; gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship, emergency medicine, and other STEM fields; and the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through networks in higher education (funded by a National Science Foundation grant).

Gates, Alexander J., Jessica R. Gold, †Laura K. Nelson, and †Kathrin Zippel. 2024. “Translating Interdisciplinary Knowledge for Gender Equity: Quantifying the Impact of NSF ADVANCE.” Social Science Quarterly 105 (2): 342-358.

Nelson, Laura K., Alexandra Brewer, Anna S. Mueller, Daniel M. O’Connor, Arjun Dayal, and Vineet M. Arora. 2023. “Taking the Time: The Implications of Workplace Assessment for Organizational Gender Inequality.” American Sociological Review 88 (4): 627-655.

King, Brayden G and Laura K. Nelson. 2023. “Beyond Protests: Using Computational Text Analysis to Explore a Greater Variety of Social Movement Activities.” Maher, Thomas V. and Eric W. Schoon (eds.). Methodological Advances in Research on Social Movements, Conflict, and Change (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change) 47: 13-35.

Brewer, Alexandra, Laura K. Nelson, Anna S. Mueller, *Rebecca Ewert, Daniel M. O’Connor, Arjun Dayal, and Vineet M. Arora. 2023. “Gender and Inconsistent Evaluations: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Feedback for Emergency Medicine Residents.” Western Journal of Emergency Medicine 24 (5): 847-854.

Miner, Adam S., *Sheridan A. Stewart, Meghan C. Halley, Laura K. Nelson, and Eleni Linos. 2023. “Formally Comparing Topic Models and Human-Generated Qualitative Coding of Physician Mothers’ Experiences of Workplace Discrimination.” Big Data & Society 10 (1): 20539517221149106.

Replication Repository: https://zenodo.org/record/7486093

Nelson, Laura K. 2022. “Situated Knowledges and Partial Perspectives: A Framework for Radical Objectivity in Computational Social Science and Computational Humanities.” New Literary History 54(1): 853-877.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/lknelson/RadicalObjectivity

Nelson, Laura K. 2022. “The Inequality of Intersectionalities in Chicago’s First-Wave Women’s Movement.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47 (4): 905-930.

Nelson, Laura K., *Rebekah Getman, and *Syed Arefinul Haque. 2022. “And the Rest is History: Measuring the Scope and Recall of Wikipedia’s Coverage of Three Women’s Movement Subgroups.” Sociological Methods & Research 51 (4): 1788–1825.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/syedarehaq/wikipedia_gender_concepts_establishment

Nelson, Laura K. 2021. “Cycles of Conflict, a Century of Continuity: The Impact of Persistent Place-Based Political Logics on Social Movement Strategy.” American Journal of Sociology 127 (1): 1-59.

†Nelson, Laura K. and †Kathrin Zippel. 2021. “From Theory to Practice and Back: How the Concept of Implicit Bias was Implemented in Academe, and What this Means for Gender Theories of Organizational Change.” Gender & Society 35 (3): 330-357.

Nelson, Laura K. 2021. “Leveraging the Alignment between Machine Learning and Intersectionality: Using Word Embeddings to Measure Intersectional Experiences of the Nineteenth Century U.S. South.” Poetics 88:  101539.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/lknelson/measuring_intersectionality

Nelson, Laura K., *Derek Burk, *Marcel Knudsen, and Leslie McCall. 2021. “The Future of Coding: A Comprehensive Comparison of Hand-Coding and Computer-Assisted Text Analysis Methods.” Sociological Methods & Research 50 (1): 202-237.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/lknelson/future-of-coding

Nelson, Laura K. and Brayden G King. 2020. “The Meaning of Action: Linking Goals, Tactics, and Strategies in the Environmental Movement.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 25 (3): 315–338.

Nelson, Laura K. 2020. “Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework.” Sociological Methods & Research 49 (1): 3-42.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/lknelson/computational-grounded-theory

Nelson, Laura K., Derek Burk, Marcel Knudsen, and Leslie McCall. 2021. “The Future of Coding: A Comprehensive Comparison of Hand-Coding and Computer-Assisted Text Analysis Methods.” Sociological Methods and Research 50 (1): 202-237.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/lknelson/future-of-coding

Nelson, Laura K. and Brayden G King. 2020. “The Meaning of Action: Linking Goals, Tactics, and Strategies in the Environmental Movement.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 25 (3): 315–338.

Nelson, Laura K. 2020. “Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework.” Sociological Methods and Research 49 (1): 3-42.

Replication Repository: https://github.com/lknelson/computational-grounded-theory

2020: Best Meta-Reviewer, 12th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo20)

2020: Outstanding Faculty of the Year (given by the graduate students at Northeastern University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology)

Jinyang Yu