Text, Culture Time: Bringing Complex Systems to Bear on Cultural Sociology Through Computational Mixed Methods

Dunivin, Zackary Okun

This doctoral dissertation is a treatise on the use of computational data and methods to study culture and cultural change using my own empirical and methodological work as a substrate. I begin by showing that many of the challenges of studying culture originate in the complex nature of culture itself. Drawing on theories from the literature on complex systems, I first show that the complex adaptive systems framework has considerable overlap with contemporary sociological theories of culture including cognitive schemas, symbolic boundaries, and cultural environments. I then explore several aspects of complex systems as they are manifest in culture, and discuss how computationally derived data, such as trace data and digital archives, and computational methods, such as natural language processing and simulation, can be leveraged to capture this complexity. Five subsequent chapters demonstrate the use of computation to understand culture with studies I have conducted independently or leading a team of collaborators. Each piece is accompanied by a discussion of the methodological and data choices made for these studies noting how computation allows for the pursuit of questions that are otherwise difficult to analyze. In particular, I show how combining computational, qualitative, and traditional quantitative methods leverages the strengths of each to understand culture and culture change by capturing, rather than abstracting away, complexity.

Text, Culture Time: Bringing Complex Systems to Bear on Cultural Sociology Through Computational Mixed Methods

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