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Arthur Spirling (New York University)
Selection committee: Suzanna Linn (Penn State, chair), Sunshine Hillygus (Duke), Luke Keele (Georgetown), and Walter Mebane (Michigan)
Citation
The Emerging Scholar Committee is pleased to announce Arthur Spirling as the 2018 Society for Political Methodology Emerging Scholar Award recipient. Spirling’s contributions to the field of political methodology are impressive and broad ranging, encompassing scholarship, leadership, and institution-building. Arthur received his PhD in political science from the University of Rochester in 2008 and is currently an associate professor Politics and Data Science at NYU, where he is Deputy Director of the Center for Data Science. He has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University. He has published important scholarship in methodology in Political Analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association, The American Statistician, and the American Journal of Political Science. In addition, he has co-developed R packages relating to parliamentary data (tapiR) and text preprocessing (preText). His many substantive contributions blend innovative methodological tools with the study of comparative politics. Arthur has been a leader in the exploding subfield of text as data where he has published a number of both substantive and methodological articles. He has been instrumental in building institutions that facilitate scholarship. His institution-building efforts include co-organizing the “Text as Data” annual conference, and serving as Director of the “Text as Data Association.” In addition to his leadership in “Text as Data” Arthur serves as a steering committee member for the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment and is a PI for the NSF-funded project, “Computational and Historical Resources on Nations and Organizations for the Social Sciences,” which is collecting, processing, and analyzing millions of U.S. government records related to international relations. The project will improve the infrastructure for multidisciplinary research and teaching while also providing access to large volumes of data in international relations. He has also compiled a dataset on legislative activity in the UK parliament that covers 100 years of roll call votes, speeches, election results, and career paths. Finally, he has long been an active member of the Society for Political Methodology—winner of the dissertation prize as a graduate student in 2007, a frequent participant in the summer meeting, and now a member of Political Analysis editorial board.