Using Network Tools to Interpret Cultural Systems

Using Network Tools to Interpret Cultural Systems John Mohr University of California, Santa Barbara Talk for the Network Science IGERT, University of California, Santa Barbara (11/21/14) Slides @ www.ucsb.soc.edu/ct 1 1

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis 2

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: A. Dissertation Yale, Sociology (1992) Classic Problem How do you explain Modernity? In sub-field of Organizational Sociology a new Paradigm The New Institutionalism. The Iron Cage Revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in Organizational Fields. ASR, 1983. Google scholar, 27,393 citations Paul DiMaggio, Princeton Walter (Woody) Powell, Stanford 3

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: A. Dissertation Yale, Sociology (1992) Other Faculty as well: Charles Perrow, Yale (emeritus) Scott Boorman, Yale 4

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: A. Dissertation Yale, Sociology (1992) Other Faculty as well: Harrison White, Harvard structural equivalence & block-modeling Charles Perrow, Yale (emeritus) Scott Boorman, Yale 5

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: Harrison White, Sociology at Harvard (1963-1986) Trained dozens of grad students in Social Network Analysis (SNA) Harrison White, (Columbia U., emeritus) Others include... Mark Granovetter (Stanford) Edward Laumann (Chicago) Barry Wellman (Toronto) Robert Eccles (Harvard) William Sims Bainbridge (NSF) Christopher Winship (Harvard) Kathleen Carley (Carnegie Mellon) Peter Bearman (Columbia), Etc. Ronald Breiger U. Arizona Paul DiMaggio, Princeton Scott Boorman, Yale 6

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: B. My Goal Apply new institutionalism theory to explain the rise of bureaucratic (rational) organizations in field of social welfare. NIMH. A New Way to explain the Modernization of Poverty Relief. Off to the Archives. 7

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: C. My Big Data The NYC Charity Directories. 1881 by The New York Scientific Charity Association. Beginning to Index services offered to facilitate referrals to regulate and control (Michel Foucault) 8

Labor Intensive Phase of early period Big Data studies in sociology (e.g., when OCR fails you, type it in) 12

#I 111 Charity Fund of the Chamber of Commerce #D 1883 #J 42 Technologies I coded as variables but descriptions of persons I copied verbatim #W distressed merchants who shall have been members of the Chamber in good repute in the City of New York and whose misfortunes were not the result of, or attended by any dishonorable transactions on their part. This turned out to be important since it started me on the road to text mining 13

#I 681 New York Juvenile Asylum #L 176th Street and 10th Avenue #D 1851 #J 23 #WP truant children of both sexes residents of city committed by Magistrate 7 <=AGE<= 14 #WP truant children of both sexes residents of the city surrendered by parents or guardians 7 <=AGE<= 14 #WP disobedient children of both sexes residents of the city committed by Magistrate 7 <=AGE<= 14 #WP disobedient Children of both sexes residents of the city surrendered by parents or guardians 7 <=AGE<= 14 #J 53 #WP friendless children #WP surrendered children I also preserved the overall syntax by interweaving technology codes and person descriptions so as to mimic original text flow 15

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: D. Blockmodels and Cultural Categories Soldiers, Mothers, Tramps and Others: Discourse Roles in the 1907 New York City Charity Directory Poetics, (1994). A new style of applying block-models. Instead of studying individuals (or organizations, etc.) connected through social ties... treat cultural identity categories as nodes in a network. Array of treatments, relief, punishment as relations (e.g., two-mode data). Can Network Analysis help us to interpret systems of cultural meaning? 16

Tramp(F) Tramp(M) Disabled(NG) Stranger(NG) Unwed_Mother ExConvict(NG) Immigrant(F) Unemploy(M) Unemploy(NG) Unemploy(F) Blind(NG) Immigrant(NG) Seamen Soldiers Widows HiStatus(F) HiStatus(NG) HiStatus(M) Consmptv(NG) Working Men Other_Mother Working Boy Working Girl WorkngWoman Blind(F) Blind(M) Block-1 Block-2 Block-3 Block-4 Block-5 Block-6 Block-7 Block-8 18

I searched the full text strings for all identities included in each block to code for other qualities like gender and the use of moral qualifiers in the category usages. 19

Summary of II. arguments First Efforts -- Measuring Meaning about what procedures reveal about the deep logic of this organizational field 20

I. Cultural Interpretation and Formal Analysis: E. Duality as Principle for Interpretation. John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne. The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, 1888-1917. Theory and Society, (April/June) Vol. 26/2-3: 305-356 (1997). Instead of individuals treat cultural identity categories as nodes in a network. Array of treatments, relief, punishment. 21

Duality Analysis Ron Breiger 1974 The Duality of Persons and Groups. Social Forces 53:181-190. 22

The main idea is that there is a structure that defines the linkages between the individuals (and the linkage are the groups that they belong to) and there is a structure that defines the social order of the groups (and the linkage are the individuals that are members of the groups). Thus, there are two separate orders but each is defined by the other. In a sense, the two orders make each other up. The elements of one are the relations of the other and vice versa. 23

An Application of Duality Analysis: What is the Meaning of the term Indigent? Or Destitution? Distress? Deservingness or Worthyness? Being described as Fallen, Homeless, Misfortunate, Needy, or Poor? (These are historians questions). Basic Hunch Look to Practical Implications: Who is Given Advice? Who is given Food? Money? Work? Who is Investigated or put in the Poorhouse? 1888 208 references to these Person Categories in NYCCD We look for logical possibility (binary yes/no) 24

Mohr & Duquenne Cultural Distinction x Practice, 1888: What goes with what? 25

Cultural Distinction x Poverty Practice, 1888: What is a subset of what? (And, vice-versa) Mohr & Duquenne 26

Cultural Distinction x Poverty Practice, 1888: Mohr & Duquenne What are the structural articulations that define each other? 27

Split: whenever a pair category/practice (c/p) is such that both are "irreducible" and that p is the lowest practice not below c while c is the highest category not above p in the lattice, the pair c/p is said to be "perspective." Example paidwk/needy 28

g:give$ f:food 30

g:give$ f:food 32

Cultural Distinction x Poverty Practice: A Focus on Splits in Lattice Structures as Critical Markers for textual interpretation. Mohr & Duquenne 33

Cultural Distinction x Poverty Practice in 1917: Mohr & Duquenne Thirty Years Later A New Institutional Logic stabilizes. Intervening years were chaotic but after historical modernization, a new logic emerges. The core lattice (which is highly regular) sits on top of the new core technology which is Investigation (Investg) 34

III. More examples of Formal Analysis and the Sociology of Culture 35

D. Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture Charles Tilly (1929-2008) 1997 Parliamentarization of Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834. Theory & Society 26 (2/3):245-273 Uses Blockmodels to Analyze Duality of Identities & Actions (in thousand of newspaper articles published from 1758-1834). 36

D. Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture. Ann Mische & Pip Pattison Lattice analysis groups & individual ideologies Poetics, 2000 Vol. 27 (2/3): 163-194. Studies youth movements in Brazil (1990s) 37

D. Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture Ron Breiger examines the duality of the structure of individual influence structures among Supreme Court justices and the ideological structure of the key issues that split the court. A Tool Kit for Practice Theory. Poetics 27 (2000): 91-115. 38

D. Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture Bernard Harcourt examines the duality of youth Gun practices and Gun ideologies. Measured Interpretation: Introducing the Method of Correspondence Analysis to Legal Studies. University of Illinois Law Review vol. 2002 (2003): 979-1018. 39

Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture John Martin examines the duality of animal species and occupational types. What do animals do all day? The division of labor, class bodies, and totemic thinking in the popular imagination. Poetics vol. 27 (2000): 195-231. 40

Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture John Mohr & Francesca Guerra-Pearson The Duality of Niche and Form: The Differentiation of Institutional Space in New York City, 1888-1917. Pp. 321-368 in Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 31) We borrow theories and methods from ecology theory as a way to analyze the inter-species competition between different organizational forms 41

D. Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture Mohr, John W. and Helene K. Lee. 2000. From Affirmative Action to Outreach: Discourse Shifts at the University of California. Poetics. Special Issue on Culture and Cognition edited by Karen Cerulo Vol. 28/1:47-71 Figure 3. Race Discourse Structure of Boundary Programs Intellectual Skills Poverty Exceptional Ability 42

D. Duality Analysis - Examples of Applying Duality Analysis to Culture Happiness as the Duality of Ritual & Belief with Josep Rodriguez at U Barcelona. 43

IV. Text Mining Tools and the Formal Analysis of Culture. 44

A. New Developments in Digital Humanities More recent work: Franco Moretti. 2011. Network Theory, Plot Analysis. New Left Review 68: 80-102. Use networks tools to map plot structure in Shakespeare vs. Traditional Chinese Novels. 46

A. New Developments in Digital Humanities 47

B. LDA Topic Models. * Taken from David Blei, Princeton: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/kddtutorial.pdf 48

NEXT TIME -- INSERT Table 1. with summary info of the papers. 51

V. New Collaborative Opportunities between Computer Sciences and Human Sciences. 54

New Project looks at evolution of discourse logics in U.S. National Security Strategy Statements (1990-2010) Ron Breiger (U. Arizona), Robin Wagner-Pacifici (New School) & Petko Bogdanov (CS, U Albany). Is there a deep structure? An implicit moral ordering? 55

1I. What are the NSS docs? Origins: the Goldwater- Nichols legislation 1986 intended to address interservice rivalry & chain of command (but also demanded a public accountability from Exec Branch by asking for annual review in the NSS). Probably most famous was the 2002 NSS in which Bush administration laid out principles of the right of a preemptive attack (justifying the invasion of Iraq). 57

Kenneth Burke s Theory of Dramatism, (1930s-1960s) Society is organized into situations that are defined by Dramatistic elements. 58

In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. Act :which is associated with dramatic action verbs and answers the question "what?", What is the action? What is going on? What action; what thoughts? Scene: which is associated with the setting of an act and answers the questions "when?" and "where?" Agent which answers the question "by whom?" Agency (means), which is associated with the person or the organization that committed the deed and answers the question "how?" Purpose which is associated with meaning and answers the question "why? 59

A Partial Approach combines three types of text-mining tools: 1. We Use Natural Language Processing (Named Entity Recognition, NER) tools to find all Agents. 2. Use syntactic parser to tag parts of speech (at the sentence level) to find Acts. 3. Use topic models to sift the text for more coherent discussion frames to find Scenes. 60

1st Step Natural Language Processing (NLP): NER (Named Entity Recognition) by Dan Roth (Univ Illinois) (See Design Challenges & Misconceptions in Named Entity Recognition. 2009.) Step 1. Identifying Terms - Drawing on previous use of term, syntactic context, capitalization, etc. Step 2. External Knowledge Gazetteers (e.g., look up from data on web & Wikipedia). Our focus Agentic Identities 61

6,103 Concepts identified in the corpus 62

Most Frequent Agentic Concepts NSS 1990-2010 63

Frequency of State Agents in NSS over time 64

Frequency of Regions in NSS over time 65

Frequency of People & Orgs in NSS over time 66

Then analyze local sentence syntax and extract verbs that are connected to any concepts, represented as a network of: Concept - Verb Verb-Concept Concept - Verb - Concept Look at clusters of Agents and Acts 67

1990 NSS George H. W. Bush (Concept-Verb or Verb-Concept 3+) 68

1990 NSS George H. W. Bush (Concept-Verb-Concept 3+) 69

1991 NSS George H. W. Bush (Concept-Verb-Concept 3+) 70

1995 NSS William Clinton (Concept-Verb-Concept 3+) 71

1996 NSS William Clinton (Concept-Verb-Concept 3+) 72

2002 NSS George W. Bush (Concept-Verb-Concept 3+) 73

2010 NSS Barack Obama (Concept-Verb-Concept 3+) 74

15 Level Topic Model of NSS Corpus Topic Distribution Across Years 76