fact that, conveniently enough, this arbitrary convention still left the first author slot to be occupied by the more (institutionally) senior member of the group. In spite of that, this paper would never had come to fruition if it was not for Dustin Stoltz's vision, perseverance, and hard work (especially when it comes to assembling the citation data) and as such he deserves special thanks. Dustin was the first one to "see" a paper where the first author just saw a set of smart points usable to impress students in a seminar context. Dustin herded all of the cats, and made the seemingly quixotic attempt to write a seven-authored theory piece seem like a breeze. Of course, it was the intellectual input of all authors that ultimately made the paper more than the sum of its separate parts although we will spare you tired emergence analogies.

A perennial concern in frame analysis is explaining how frames structure perception and persuade audiences. In this article, we suggest that the distinction between personal culture and public culture offers a productive way forward. We propose an approach centered on an analytic contrast between schemas, which we define as a form of personal culture, and frames, which we define as a form of public culture. We develop an “evocation model” of the structure and function of frames. In the model, frames are conceived as material assemblages that activate a network of schemas, thereby evoking a response when people are exposed to them. We discuss how the proposed model extends, and clarifies, extant approaches, and consider new directions for future research.

We propose a method for measuring a text's engagement with a focal concept using distributional representations of the meaning of words. More specifically, this measure relies on Word Mover's Distance, which uses word embeddings to determine similarities between two documents. In our approach, which we call Concept Mover's Distance, a document is measured by the minimum distance the words in the document need to travel to arrive at the position of a "pseudo document" consisting of only words denoting a focal concept. This approach captures the prototypical structure of concepts, is fairly robust to pruning sparse terms as well as variation in text lengths within a corpus, and when used with pre-trained embeddings, can be used even when terms denoting concepts are absent from corpora and can be applied to bag-of-words datasets. We close by outlining some limitations of the proposed method as well as opportunities for future research.

Can cognitive neuroscience contribute to cultural sociology? We argue that it can, but to profit from such contributions requires developing coherent positions at the level of ontology and coherent epistemological views concerning interfield relations in science. In this paper, we carve out a coherent position that makes sense for cultural sociology based on Sperber's "infraindividualist" and Clark's "extended cognition" arguments. More substantively, we take on three canonical topics in cultural sociology: language, intersubjectivity, and associational links between elements, showing that the cognitive neurosciences can make conceptual and empirical contributions to the thinking of cultural sociologists in these areas. We conclude by outlining the opportunities for further development of work at the intersection of cultural sociology and the cognitive neurosciences.

In sociology, a cultural object is the "binding" of significance to a material form. But, how do people "bind" otherwise discrete elements as a single element? In cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, this is known as the "binding problem." Sociologists can learn from research on binding, as it deepens our understanding of cultural objects, learning, and social change. Binding is the process by which a material "token" is assimilated into (or expands the boundaries of) a cognitive "type," or resists such typification thereby leading to the formation of a new cognitive "type." Cultural objects are simultaneously types and tokens, and the interplay between them results in a fundamental cultural instability. Binding is an attempt to stabilize meaning in two ways: the first, innovating, is implicated in the emergence of a cultural object, and the second, indexicalizing, in its maintenance and extension. However, even the process of indexicalizing a well-established type-i.e., the proliferation of tokensprovides the material fodder from which to innovate new types. Attention to binding processes in the production and reception of cultural objects reveals important insight into the dynamics of cultural change and stability.