COM 674

Dad Joke

When I was a kid we were so poor that we had to share a calculator, and the “X” button didn’t even work.

Times were hard.

Housekeeping

  • Start on data collection now
  • The rest of the class
    • Git
    • Stats
    • Screen scraping
    • Additional topics

Cleaning data

  • Why is data ‘dirty’?
    • Errors in transcription
    • Bugs in software that produced it
    • Missing data (e.g., when a date is unknown it’s recoded as Jan 1)
    • Can’t be read by software
      • Wrong date format
      • Multiple age formats - e.g., ‘4’, ‘4 yo’, ‘4 years’
    • Observations that shouldn’t be in the analysis
    • Inappropriate for statistical tests
      • log-transformations
      • Coding groups (e.g., high-risk and low-risk)

Operationalization

  • Making a construct measurable
    • Constructs are not empirical and can’t be tested directly
    • We must argue that our measures represent or at least are correlated with the concepts we really care about
    • Hypotheses relate concepts together, e.g., “socially cohesive groups are more willing to contribute to shared goals”
    • In order to test this, need to argue that you have something that represents social cohesion, and something that represents shared goals.

Online data

  • Online data is “raw”
    • This is generally wonderful - we have actual conversations, full text, etc.
  • However, it isn’t made for researchers
    • It isn’t designed to measure a construct
    • We have to do the work to create measures that measure them (and recognize when we can’t)

HW Review

Papers

Sara Klingenstein, Tim Hitchcock, and Simon DeDeo. 2014. The civilizing process in London’s Old Baily. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

How can we detect changes in culture?

  • Digitization of historical records allows for comparison across time
    • Google N-gram viewer
    • Censuses
  • This paper uses court transcripts from London’s Old Bailey courthouse from 1760s-1910s

Violent and non-violent offenses are talked about differently

Some questions

  • What are some of the dangers of doing this kind of work?
  • What are some computational methods that are becoming “normalized” in your discipline?

Merton Paper

Merton, Robert K. 1948. The Bearing of Empirical Research upon the Development of Social Theory. American Sociological Review.

Empirical research for developing theory

  • Empirical work doesn’t just verify/test theories
  • Serendipity: Something odd in data that needs an explanation
  • Recasting: New aspects become more salient
  • Refocusing: Advances in procedures lead to attention where things can be measured/tested
  • Clarification: Operationalizing concepts requires drawing boundaries around them