Sean D. Long

This page contains a brief description of my current professional research (under construction).

Voting Rights and Redistricting

I have worked as a research analyst with Collingwood Research for several years, where I conduct research on voting demographics and the redistricting process. This work builds on my academic interest and work with Loren Collingwood in studying local politics and election disparities. In addition to providing support for VRA-related litigation, we have also built maps for multiple redistricting cycles, notably West Contra Costa School District and the Roswell Independent School District.

Online Extremism and Text Analysis

I am involved in work monitoring online extremist communities, build on my work with Yonatan Lupu at George Washington University. As part of this work, I used machine learning classifiers to perform sentiment analysis on extremist posts in the months leading up to and following the 2021 Capitol Riot. I have also used LDA methods to create topic models of extremist blog text, as published in Politics, Groups, and Identities in 2022.

R Package Development

I also work on developing, updating, and maintaining R packages. In terms of public packages, this includes the eiCompare and eiExpand packages, the industry standard packages used in racially polarized voting analysis. These packages are currently used in ongoing redistricting cases in Texas and North Carolina.