He earned his PhD at Stanford University working in a blend of sociolinguistics and formal linguistics. His early career was spent at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he helped found the Linguistics PhD program. He came to Indiana University in 2000 as one of the first regular faculty members in Informatics, serving briefly in a three-way joint appointment with Library and Information Science and Linguistics, during which time he helped to create the Computational Linguistics track within the Linguistics Masters. At IU, the major emphasis of his research shifted to statistical models of language and large-scale social network analysis of online activity. He is the author of a book on the statistical analysis of language (Analyzing Linguistic Variation, CSLI Publications, 2002).