Daulton Selke | Computational Social Scientist

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Welcome to my scholarly homepage! My name is Daulton Selke, and I am a PhD student in North Carolina State’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology.

I am a computational social scientist with interests at the union of sociolinguistics and cognitive cultural sociology. My work explores the representational architecture underlying our perceptions of other people, with particular attention to dialectal variation as a cue for socially distributed associations. I draw from sociophonetic methods for linguistic description to increase the resolution of spoken language variables in sociological analyses, hoping to clarify the role of language in cultural sociological accounts of perception, thought, and behavior. Additionally, I use natural language processing techniques from computational linguistics to aid in cultural measurement of text data. I am especially interested in the way that our systems of associative, cultural knowledge function to reproduce patterns of social inequality. This has led me downstream to several of my current projects on gender-stereotypical language in US federal job advertisements and dialect bias in AI hiring technologies.

Interests

Sociolinguistics
Cultural and Cognitive Sociology
Mechanisms of Social Inequality
Quantitative and Computational Methods
Ethics in AI Technologies

Projects Currently Underway

Sociolinguistic Variation and Automatic Prediction of Occupational Fit
Occupational Segregation and Gendered Language in Job Advertisements
Social Class Foundations of Adolescent Informal Mentoring Experiences
Statehood and Media Depictions of Agency in Conflict

Education

PhD, Sociology, North Carolina State University (expected 2026)
M.S., Sociology, North Carolina State University (2023)
B.A., Writing & Applied Linguistics, Grand Valley State University (2017)