Last year’s ASA meetings included some special sessions on big data and Facebook is hosting a pre-conference this year at the company’s headquarters.

VentureBeat has learned that Facebook is to hold an academics-only conference in advance of the American Sociological Association 2014 Annual Meeting this August in San Francisco.

Facebook will run shuttles from the ASA conference hotel to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. According to the company’s event description, the pre-conference focuses on “techniques related to data collection with the advent of social media and increased interconnectivity across the world.”…

According to the event schedule, Facebook will give a demo of its tools and software stack at the conference…

There seems to be a great demand for sociologists who can code. Corey now spends a lot of time hiring fellow sociologists, according to his article. It is also the case in other big companies. In one interview conducted with the London School of Economics, Google’s Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan claimed that he just couldn’t hire enough social scientists.

This is a growing area of employment for sociologists who would benefit from getting access to proprietary yet amazing data and would also have to negotiate different structures in the private technology world versus academia.