Elle Johnston

I study the structure and function of social categories, with a particular interest in improving methods for measuring/modeling their content and boundaries. My previous work has focused on the role of partisan stereotypes in polarization and on improving the reliability of cultural measurement with word embeddings (a machine learning method that represents word meanings as vectors in a high-dimensional space). My current work focuses on improving the measurement of intersectional stereotypes with word embeddings, and on using word embeddings to model the structure of gender categories in English fiction.