How Can Asian American Studies Benefit from Computational Sociology?

Abstract: This exploratory paper addresses the question, “How can Asian American studies benefit from computational sociology?” I answer this question with the following four points. 1) Educators who understand and/or utilize computational sociology will be current with social science methodology, and thus well-positioned to research and teach both innovatively and preemptively. 2) Creating and using large data sets will allow AAS to scale systematically, particularly in the efforts to discover and recover. 3) Students who can conceptualize or use computational sociology will gain more portable human capital. 4) Increasing computational power and more sophisticated software will bridge AAS not only with computational sociology, but also with complexity science and artificial intelligence/generative artificial intelligence, and thus advance AAS to unprecedented horizons. The article concludes with limitations, caveats, and areas of future research, particularly via complexity science, to keep Asian American studies both relevant and innovative.