Resources & Publications
What the community has produced, and what it builds on
The community's own publications, the readings that shaped its agenda, and pointers to tools for interpretive work with data. We link and annotate rather than host and maintain.
From our conferences
Work developed through IDeaS events has led to an edited volume and two journal special issues.
- Edited volumeGlaser, V. L., Moser, C., Anderson, D. A., & Jennings, P. D. (Eds.) (2025). Algorithmic Organizing. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 95. Emerald Publishing.Developed from papers presented at the 2023 Edmonton conference on the ethnography of algorithmic organizing.
- Special issueOrganization Studies — Algorithmic Organizing: Exploring the Pervasive Impact of Algorithms on Organizations and Society.Linked to the 2025 Ottawa workshop.
- Special issueInformation & Organization — Algorithmic Assemblages: Fields, Ecosystems, and Platforms. An Interpretive Approach.Linked to the 2025 and 2026 events; editor meetings closed the London conference.
Foundational readings
The reading list the community assembled on its original website — the work that shaped its founding agenda.
- Hannigan, T. R., Haans, R. F. J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser, V. L., Wang, M. S., Kaplan, S., & Jennings, P. D. (2019). Topic modeling in management research: Rendering new theory from textual data. Academy of Management Annals, 13(2), 586–632.The community's flagship paper, and the source of the rendering vocabulary above.
- DiMaggio, P. (2015). Adapting computational text analysis to social science (and vice versa). Big Data & Society, 2(2).
- Brayne, S. (2017). Big data surveillance: The case of policing. American Sociological Review, 82(5), 977–1008.
- Bail, C. A., Brown, T. W., & Wimmer, A. (2019). Prestige, proximity, and prejudice: How Google search terms diffuse across the world. American Journal of Sociology, 124(5), 1496–1548.
- Goldenstein, J., & Poschmann, P. (2019). Analyzing meaning in big data: Performing a map analysis using grammatical parsing and topic modeling. Sociological Methodology, 49(1), 83–131.
- Nelson, L. K. (2019). Comment: To measure meaning in big data, don't give me a map, give me transparency and reproducibility. Sociological Methodology, 49(1), 139–143.A direct response to the paper above, and a statement of the transparency standard the community works to.
- Mohr, J. W., & Bogdanov, P. (2013). Introduction—Topic models: What they are and why they matter. Poetics, 41(6), 545–569.
- Schmiedel, T., Müller, O., & vom Brocke, J. (2019). Topic modeling as a strategy of inquiry in organizational research: A tutorial with an application example on organizational culture. Organizational Research Methods, 22(4), 941–968.
- Rao, H., & Greve, H. R. (2018). Disasters and community resilience: Spanish flu and the formation of retail cooperatives in Norway. Academy of Management Journal, 61(1), 5–25.
- Melamed, D., Simpson, B., Harrell, A., Munn, C. W., Abernathy, J. Z., & Sweitzer, M. (2020). Homophily and segregation in cooperative networks. American Journal of Sociology, 125(4), 1084–1127.
- Wang, S., & Vergne, J.-P. (2017). Buzz factor or innovation potential: What explains cryptocurrencies' returns? PLOS ONE, 12(1), e0169556.
Tools & methods resources
Pointers to tools members of the community use. We deliberately link and describe rather than host and maintain code — keeping a code base alive is more work than a volunteer community can sustain.
- Semantic Network Analysis (semna.org)
An approach and toolset for analyzing meaning structures in text, developed within the broader community of interpretive text analysts.
- Topic modeling libraries
Standard implementations in R and Python. What matters for interpretive work is less the library than the documented reasoning behind model and parameter choices.
- Qualitative analysis software
Tools such as NVivo, ATLAS.ti, and MAXQDA remain the workhorses for the ethnographic side of the community.
- Reference and note management
Zotero and similar tools, increasingly connected to scripted workflows — an area several members are actively experimenting with.
Related centres
Research centres whose work connects with ours.
- Imperial Business Analytics
Imperial College London. Brings business-focused academics together with data-science specialists to study how analytics, data, and AI change business and society.
- W. Maurice Young Centre for Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Research
UBC Sauder School of Business. A sponsor of the founding 2019 workshop.
- Centre for Entrepreneurship & Family Enterprise (CEFE)
University of Alberta. Has administered travel stipends for several IDeaS events.
- Canadian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
University of Alberta. A sponsor of the founding 2019 workshop.
- West Coast Research Symposium
A long-running scholarly gathering with a similar small, developmental character.
In development
We are building out a set of shared workflows — practical starting points for assembling the mix of tools that computational and interpretive research now requires, so that people are not each starting from scratch. If you have a workflow worth sharing, or want one, please get in touch.