The authors of articles in this special issue on “Ethics in SNA” contribute to enriching the continuing discussion of major ethical dilemmas that social network analysts need to confront. These ...articles encourage us to replace silence with thoughtful consideration and innovative paths forward. I highlight three themes that emerged in my own reading of these contributions: moving beyond “ethics versus science,” deepening reflexivity, and possible approaches toward a critical SNA.
A burgeoning literature spanning sociologies of culture and social network methods has for the past several decades sought to explicate the relationships between culture and connectivity. A number of ...promising recent moves toward integration are worthy of review, comparison, critique, and synthesis. Network thinking provides powerful techniques for specifying cultural concepts ranging from narrative networks to classification systems, tastes, and cultural repertoires. At the same time, we see theoretical advances by sociologists of culture as providing a corrective to network analysis as it is often portrayed, as a mere collection of methods. Cultural thinking complements and sets a new agenda for moving beyond predominant forms of structural analysis that ignore action, agency, and intersubjective meaning. The notion of "cultural holes" that we use to organize our review points both to the cultural contingency of network structure and to the increasingly permeable boundary between studies of culture and research on social networks.
The late pre-Hispanic period in the US Southwest (A.D. 1200–1450) was characterized by large-scale demographic changes, including long-distance migration and population aggregation. To reconstruct ...how these processes reshaped social networks, we compiled a comprehensive artifact database from major sites dating to this interval in the western Southwest. We combine social network analysis with geographic information systems approaches to reconstruct network dynamics over 250 y. We show how social networks were transformed across the region at previously undocumented spatial, temporal, and social scales. Using well-dated decorated ceramics, we track changes in network topology at 50-y intervals to show a dramatic shift in network density and settlement centrality from the northern to the southern Southwest after A.D. 1300. Both obsidian sourcing and ceramic data demonstrate that long-distance network relationships also shifted from north to south after migration. Surprisingly, social distance does not always correlate with spatial distance because of the presence of network relationships spanning long geographic distances. Our research shows how a large network in the southern Southwest grew and then collapsed, whereas networks became more fragmented in the northern Southwest but persisted. The study also illustrates how formal social network analysis may be applied to large-scale databases of material culture to illustrate multigenerational changes in network structure.
Forecasting extremely rare events is a pressing problem, but efforts to model such outcomes are often limited by the presence of multiple causes within classes of events, insufficient observations of ...the outcome to assess fit, and biased estimates due to insufficient observations of the outcome. We introduce a novel approach for analyzing rare event data that addresses these challenges by turning attention to the conditions under which rare outcomes do not occur. We detail how configurational methods can be used to identify conditions or sets of conditions that would preclude the occurrence of a rare outcome. Results from Monte Carlo experiments show that our approach can be used to systematically preclude up to 78.6% of observations, and application to ground-truth data coupled with a bootstrap inferential test illustrates how our approach can also yield novel substantive insights that are obscured by standard statistical analyses.
•Automated text analysis methods do not capture nuances meaningful to human readers.•We therefore formulate some low-tech text mining methods that capture distinctions.•Instead of omitting “stop ...words” prior to analysis, we analyze the function words.•We index uses of strategic anxiety in recent US national security strategy reports.•We introduce the grammatical features of modality to track strategic uncertainties.
In this article we consider some low-tech approaches to text mining. Our goal is to articulate a RiCH (Reader in Control of Hermeneutics) style of text analysis that takes advantage of the digital affordances of modern reading practices and easily deployable computational tools while also preserving the primacy of the interpretive lens of the human reader. In the article we offer three analytical interventions that are suitable to the low-tech formalizations we propose: the first and most developed intervention tracks the (normally computationally ignored) “stop” words; the second identifies the use of strategic anxiety terms in the texts; and the third (less developed in this article) introduces the grammatical features of modality (including modalization statements of probability and usuality, and modulation statements regarding degrees of obligation and inclination). All three analytical interventions provide a productive tracking of various modes and degrees of strategic decisiveness, contradiction, uncertainty and indeterminacy in a corpus of recent U.S. National Security Strategy reports.
•We apply Kenneth Burke's “grammar of motives” in analyzing national security texts.•A series of U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) documents (1990–2010) is analyzed.•We use advanced text mining ...technologies to model Burke's “dramatistic pentad”.•We show the shift over time in the rhetorical focus of NSS documents.•The rhetorical focus has moved from the logic of Cold War to that of a War on Terror.
The literary theorist Kenneth Burke (1945) outlined a methodology for identifying the basic “grammar of motives” that operate within texts. His strategy was to identify the logical form that is used for attributing meaning to human situations. We imagine how a variant of Burke's method might be applied in the era of automated text analysis, and then we explore an implementation of that variant (using a combination of natural language process, semantic parsers and statistical topic models) in analyzing a corpus of eleven U.S. “National Security Strategy” documents that were produced between 1990 and 2010. This “automated process” for textual coding and analysis is shown to have much utility for analyzing these types of texts and to hold out the promise for being useful for other types of text corpora, as well—thereby opening up new possibilities for the scientific study of rhetoric.
Progress in theorizing networks and events requires formulating a greater diversity of networks and, in particular, enabling network analysis to exploit relations between events and the attributes, ...actions, and variables that characterize them. We advance this line of inquiry in dialogue with a recent approach to the systematic study of violent conflicts among state actors and groups of people who refuse to accept their governments’ power. One productive way to analyze an insurgency is to view it as a network of sequenced events across stages (periods) of conflict. We explore this formulation, identify limitations, and present illustrative analysis demonstrating how new and useful insights can be obtained by combining our formal approach with one grounded in the comparative analysis of case studies.
In our Introduction to the Conceiving the Social with Big Data Special Issue of Big Data & Society, we survey the 18 contributions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and highlight ...several questions and themes that emerge within and across them. These emergent issues reflect the challenges, problems, and promises of working with Big Data to access and assess the social. They include puzzles about the locus and nature of human life, the nature of interpretation, the categorical constructions of individual entities and agents, the nature and relevance of contexts and temporalities, and the determinations of causality. As such, the Introduction reflects on the contributions along a series of binaries that capture the dualities and dynamisms of these themes: Life/Data; Mind/Machine; and Induction/Deduction.
In the past two decades, researchers have examined the practices of online forums operating markets for the sale of stolen credit card data. Participants cannot rely on traditional legal system ...regulations in the event of disputes between buyers and sellers. Thus, this analysis focuses on two forms of monitoring within these forums: one based on an emergent social network of transactions among community members (second-party monitoring) and the other consisting of regulatory (third-party) monitoring by forum administrators. Using social network analyses of a series of posts from a data market forum, the findings demonstrate that governance of these forums is enabled by their functioning as a particular kind of market that economists characterize as a platform, or two-sided market. Specifically, second- and third-party trust-creating mechanisms are vital in establishing sustainability in illicit markets by increasing perceived market trustworthiness, which in turn leads to increased market demand.
A methodological paradox characterizes macro-comparative research: it routinely violates the assumptions underlying its dominant method, multiple regression analysis. Comparative researchers have ...substantive interest in cases, but cases are largely rendered invisible in regression analysis. Researchers seldom recognize the mismatch between the goals of macro-comparative research and the demands of regression methods, and sometimes they end up engaging in strenuous disputes over particular variable effects. A good example is the controversial relationship between income inequality and health. Here, the authors offer an innovative method that combines variable-oriented and case-oriented approaches by turning ordinary least squares regression models “inside out.” The authors estimate case-specific contributions to regression coefficient estimates. They reanalyze data on income inequality, poverty, and life expectancy across 20 affluent countries. Multiple model specifications are dependent primarily on two countries with values on the outcome that are extreme in magnitude and inconsistent with conventional theoretical expectations.
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