Concept Class Analysis: A Method for Identifying Cultural Schemas in Texts

Taylor, Marshall A.; Stoltz, Dustin S.

doi:10.15195/v7.a23

Cited by 32 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…Conceptually and methodologically, we build on an emerging research program in sociology and political psychology that has developed ways to measure cultural schemas in a range of domains (Boutyline 2017; Goldberg 2011; Taylor and Stoltz 2020), including rank-and-file understandings of nationhood (Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016). Following key ideas in cultural sociology—that social meaning is embedded in relational networks or a “cultural matrix” and cannot be easily reduced to sets of independent attributes (Edelmann and Mohr 2018; Emirbayer 1997; Mohr 1998)—these approaches take into account multiple attitudinal dimensions and map the interrelationships between them.…”

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confidence: 99%

How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today

Soehl

Karim

2021

Am Sociol Rev

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Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism.

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confidence: 99%

How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today

Soehl

Karim

2021

Am Sociol Rev

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“…In recent years, there has been an influx of theoretical, analytical, and methodological scholarship which has provided greater clarity and specificity as to what schemas are and are not, what they do, and how they can be measured (e.g., Boutyline, 2017;Boutyline and Soter, 2021;Hunzaker and Valentino, 2019;Taylor and Stoltz, 2020;Wood et al, 2018). These contributions have been made primarily by scholars focused on culture and cognition.…”

Section: Analytical and Methodological Advancements In The Study Of Schemasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Schemas can also be studied through text data (Arseniev-Koehler and Foster, 2021;Taylor and Stoltz, 2020). Arseniev-Koehler and Foster (2021) argue that neural word embeddings --language models like Word2Vec --are formal models for learning schemas.…”

Section: Analytical and Methodological Advancements In The Study Of Schemasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sociologists have made strides analytically by better establishing what schemas are, how they are acquired and used, what distinguishes them from other cultural and cognitive entities, and how they interact with these entities (Boutyline and Soter, 2021;Cerulo et al, 2021;Hunzaker and Valentino, 2019;Wood et al, 2018). Methodologically, they have established both better methods to study schemas using survey data, and new methods to capture schemas in texts and through online experiments (Arseniev-Koehler and Foster, 2021;Boutyline, 2017;Goldberg, 2011;Taylor and Stoltz, 2020). Yet, some semantic and inferential concerns remain and, at present, we have better but still imperfect methods to capture what is theoretically one of the most important explanatory concepts in cultural analysis.…”

Section: The Potential and Pitfalls Of Studying Schemasmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Have Schemas Been Good To Think With?*

Leschziner

Brett

2021

Sociological Forum

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Schemas are one of the most popular explanatory concepts in cultural sociology, and are increasingly used in sociology more broadly. In this article we ask the question: have schemas been good to think with? We answer this question by analyzing the ontological, epistemic, and methodological bases of schemas, including the conceptualizations, claims, assumptions, and methods that underpin the use of schemas in sociological inquiry. We show that sociologists have developed two distinct, contradictory, and often conflated perspectives on schemas, what we refer to as culturalist and cognitivist perspectives. We suggest that schemas have acquired a polysemic character in sociology, and that they have become a (more narrow and consequently more scientifically legitimate) proxy for Culture, and that these features have (paradoxically) facilitated the popularity of schemas within the discipline. Sociologists have recently begun to make the necessary advancements to turn schemas into a more useful explanatory concept, through both analytical improvements (by distinguishing schemas from both public culture and other forms of nondeclarative personal culture), and methodological innovations (for better deriving schemas from survey data, texts, and experiments). Yet, some challenges remain, and the analytical value of schemas remains promissory. We conclude by offering some guidelines for making more specific and measured claims about schemas in sociological research.

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“…Atasu et al, 2017;Huang et al, 2016;Ren and Liu, 2018). More recently, WMD and its many variations have also been applied to socioculural analyses of data ranging from survey response data (Taylor and Stoltz, 2020), to Ancient Greek literature (Pöckelmann et al, 2020), to dyadic conversational dynamics (Nasir et al, 2019).…”

Section: Word Mover's Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

WMDecompose: A Framework for Leveraging the Interpretable Properties of Word Mover’s Distance in Sociocultural Analysis

Brunila¹,

LaViolette

2021

Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities An

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Despite the increasing popularity of NLP in the humanities and social sciences, advances in model performance and complexity have been accompanied by concerns about interpretability and explanatory power for sociocultural analysis.One popular model that balances complexity and legibility is Word Mover's Distance (WMD). Ostensibly adapted for its interpretability, WMD has nonetheless been used and further developed in ways which frequently discard its most interpretable aspect: namely, the word-level distances required for translating a set of words into another set of words. To address this apparent gap, we introduce WMDecompose: a model and Python library that 1) decomposes document-level distances into their constituent word-level distances, and 2) subsequently clusters words to induce thematic elements, such that useful lexical information is retained and summarized for analysis. To illustrate its potential in a social scientific context, we apply it to a longitudinal social media corpus to explore the interrelationship between conspiracy theories and conservative American discourses. Finally, because of the full WMD model's high time-complexity, we additionally suggest a method of sampling document pairs from large datasets in a reproducible way, with tight bounds that prevent extrapolation of unreliable results due to poor sampling practices.

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Concept Class Analysis: A Method for Identifying Cultural Schemas in Texts

Cited by 32 publications

References 62 publications

How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today

How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today

Have Schemas Been Good To Think With?*

WMDecompose: A Framework for Leveraging the Interpretable Properties of Word Mover’s Distance in Sociocultural Analysis

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