Digifesto

Continuing with what seems like a never-ending side project to get a handle on computational social science methods, I’m doing a literature review on ‘big data’ sociological methods papers. Recent reading has led to two striking revelations.

The first is that Tufekci’s 2014 critique of Big Data methodologies is the best thing on the subject I’ve ever read. What it does is very clearly and precisely lay out the methodological pitfalls of sourcing the data from social media platforms: use of a platform as a model organism; selecting on a dependent variable; not taking into account exogenous, ecological, or field factors; and so on. I suspect this is old news to people who have more rigorously surveyed the literature on this in the past. But I’ve been exposed to and distracted by literature that seems aimed mainly to discredit social scientists who want to work with this data, rather than helpfully engaging them on the promises and limitations of their methods.

The second striking revelation is that for the second time in my literature survey, I’ve found a reference to that time when the field of cultural sociology decided they’d had enough of Talcott Parsons. From (Bail, 2014):

The capacity to capture all – or nearly all – relevant text on a given topic opens exciting new lines of meso- and macro-level inquiry into what environments (Bail forthcoming). Ecological or functionalist interpretations of culture have been unpopular with cultural sociologists for some time – most likely because the subfield defined itself as an alternative to the general theory proposed by Talcott Parsons (Alexander 2006). Yet many cultural sociologists also draw inspiration from Mary Douglas (e.g., Alexander 2006; Lamont 1992; Zelizer 1985), who – like Swidler – insists upon the need for our subfield to engage broader levels of analysis. “For sociology to accept that no functionalist arguments work,” writes Douglas (1986, p. 43), “is like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.” To be fair, cultural sociologists have recently made several programmatic statements about the need to engage functional or ecological theories of culture. Abbott (1995), for example, explains the formation of boundaries between professional fields as the result of an evolutionary process. Similarly, Lieberson (2000), presents an ecological model of fashion trends in child-naming practices. In a review essay, Kaufman (2004) describes such ecological approaches to cultural sociology as one of the three most promising directions for the future of the subfield.

I’m not sure what’s going on with all these references to Talcott Parsons. I gather that at one time he was a giant in sociology, but that then a generation of sociologists tried to bury him. Then the next generation of sociologists reinvented structural functionalism with new language–“ecological approaches”, “field theory”?

One wonder what Talcott Parsons did or didn’t do to inspire such a rebellion.

References

Bail, Christopher A. “The cultural environment: measuring culture with big data.” Theory and Society 43.3-4 (2014): 465-482.

Tufekci, Zeynep. “Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity and Other Methodological Pitfalls.” ICWSM 14 (2014): 505-514.